The BASIC programming language turns 60

Easy-to-use programming language that drove Apple, IBM, and Commodore PCs debuted in 1964.

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[alisonken1]

It was a major plot point in Starman Jones (1953, R.A. Heinlein) that to make interstellar jumps they had to look up values from a table in a printed book, and then make calculations on a slide rule. All while under hard time pressure in the last minutes before execution.

To expand on that, the books were actually binary representations of the light readouts from the astrogation computer.

• Look up in the book the binary light pattern on the computer readout
• Calculate the next entry via slide rule
• Lookup the slide rule results to retrieve the secondary binary pattern in the book
• Enter the secondary binary pattern into the computer input

Rather entertaining at the time (one of the Juvenile series of books).