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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[brionl]

In my case, I first used BASIC on a dial-up mainframe (teletype, 110 baud phone line, files stored on paper tape; at the end of each line, you had to remember RETURN, LINE FEED, RUBOUT, RUBOUT, RUBOUT, because if you didn't include the three RUBOUTs, the print head might not get back to the start position in time). Data entry was... complex.

My first college programming class way back in nineteen ought seventy eight we alternated between IBM assembly language (I forget which model) on punch cards and BASIC on a teletype.
It was pretty fancy for a community college I guess. We had a card punch/reader in the lab we could use, and dedicated lines for the terminals, not dial-up.

Then in '80 I bought an AIM-65 with the massive 4K RAM, 8K Basic ROM and 8K Assembler/Monitor ROM. No video output, and 20 character LED display and/or a 20 char thermal printer. I had to solder up a circuit board to an audio cable for a cassette drive, but it did have cassette read/write sub routines built into the monitor.

 

[brionl]

You went to the Lawrence Hall of Science, at the top of Centennial Drive, overlooking Lawrence Berkeley Labs. Nothing Livermore about it.

@qazwart is probably conflating the Lawrence Hall of Science, in Berkeley, with the Lawrence Livermore National Labs, in Livermore. A lot of people do that, including me. I've been to the Hall of Science, my father did some work at LLNL, and I applied for jobs at LLNL a couple of times.

 

[brionl]

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.