SOFTWARE
The best version of BASIC by Robin Jubber For a great many games coders, especially the older generation of this young industry, the BBC User Guide, explaining the BBC BASIC language, was our Bible. I have two or three original User Guides in my house, just in case I lose my primary copy. They’re all falling to pieces after thirty years of service. I’m a games programmer in my 40s, and like almost every games programmer in their 40s, my first introduction to programming began with BASIC. Every 8-bit micro from the mid-70s onwards had a variation of this influential language built into the hardware, with varying degrees of implementation success. Since those days I’ve been lucky enough to program in C and C#, unlucky enough to program in languages like C++ and PHP and cursed by the gods themselves to dabble in the horror shows that are Objective-C and Lisp. And those aren’t even the worst languages out there. Some of the languages I’ve coded in no longer exist, or were exclusive to one company or even one game. Others, like C, have declined a little in popularity over the years, but still influence all the new languages, by lending familiar syntax to platforms like Java and C#. But long before I encountered pointers, classes and memory management, I, like all my contemporaries, started coding in Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, a language first invented more than half a century ago. Microsoft cornered the BASIC market for a long time, with the version that Bill Gates and Paul Allen created for the Altair in around 1975. This 8K language rom ended up in many flavours of machine back in the 70s and 80s, including Apple, Commodore, IBM, Tandy, Atari and CP/ M computers. Despite its primitive nature, the implementation was a safe bet for garage companies building kit computers and even established hardware manufacturers turned to Microsoft. MS Basic was in essence the bedrock for the entire Microsoft company we know today.
The BBC Micro home computer monopoly of course. My first exposure to any form of programming was struggling to construct simple Basic programs for the Sinclair Spectrum at school. Sinclair Basic was a pretty poor version of the language, due in no small part to being limited by the Spectrum’s one key input system and unsophisticated editing environment. The Spectrum’s hateful rubber keys were also a profoundly limiting factor. Try typing in a Spectum program using the original keyboard – it’s shockingly difficult. Other manufacturers were also experimenting with their own versions of the language, for instance Atari Basic for the XL, Wozniak’s Basic for the Apple II and Tiny Basic, which somehow fitted a functional version of the language into just a couple of kilobytes.
Not every computer manufacturer subscribed to the MS
Luckily for me my first personal computer was a BBC Micro – a truly remarkable machine that dominated the UK education market but saw only limited success outside these islands. I have to assume my dad sold a kidney to
The official BBC User Guide
A typical UK primary classroom of the 80s
RETROMAGAZINE ENGLISH YEAR 1 - ISSUE 0
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