Easy-to-use programming language that drove Apple, IBM, and Commodore PCs debuted in 1964.
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The BASIC programming language turns 60
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Gomez Addams
Ars Praetorian
Thanks for the ride on the Wayback Machine Benj.
Like many others, I did my first programming in BASIC. Mine was on an HP-3000 time-shared system using Teletypes. I didn't much programming for a while until I got out of school and then that's all I did using FORTRAN, Pascal, C, and C++. For my second job, I joined a company called Intelledex and I ran into BASIC again. Intelledex licensed BASIC from Microsoft and embedded it in their controllers and it was used to program the robots the company made. In the office they had a printout of that BASIC implementation and it used a whole box of fan-fold paper. I looked through it once and saw Bill Gates' and Paul Allen's names all over the place.
I never directly programmed a robot but I watched some people do it. One interesting feature was you could issue direct commands to tell the robot to move. This was done with a computer using a special program it ran that talked over a serial port to the controller. You would just type "Move w,x,y,z" or something similar. One of the MEs had made an end effector for the robot that would hold a pen. I had written a program that drew Spirograph shapes on the computer and I adapted it to send those motion commands to the robot. We attached the end effector to the robot, put a pen in it, and we had the robot drawing Spirograph shapes with the motion commands executed by the robot's built-in BASIC interpreter. It was pretty cool seeing a six-axis articulated robot drawing hypercycloids with very smooth curves. Those were fun times.
Incidentally, they called it RobotBASIC because they had added a bunch of motion commands to it. Also, an image search at google for Intelledex will show you what some of those robots looked like. We used a 605 for the drawing.
Like many others, I did my first programming in BASIC. Mine was on an HP-3000 time-shared system using Teletypes. I didn't much programming for a while until I got out of school and then that's all I did using FORTRAN, Pascal, C, and C++. For my second job, I joined a company called Intelledex and I ran into BASIC again. Intelledex licensed BASIC from Microsoft and embedded it in their controllers and it was used to program the robots the company made. In the office they had a printout of that BASIC implementation and it used a whole box of fan-fold paper. I looked through it once and saw Bill Gates' and Paul Allen's names all over the place.
I never directly programmed a robot but I watched some people do it. One interesting feature was you could issue direct commands to tell the robot to move. This was done with a computer using a special program it ran that talked over a serial port to the controller. You would just type "Move w,x,y,z" or something similar. One of the MEs had made an end effector for the robot that would hold a pen. I had written a program that drew Spirograph shapes on the computer and I adapted it to send those motion commands to the robot. We attached the end effector to the robot, put a pen in it, and we had the robot drawing Spirograph shapes with the motion commands executed by the robot's built-in BASIC interpreter. It was pretty cool seeing a six-axis articulated robot drawing hypercycloids with very smooth curves. Those were fun times.
Incidentally, they called it RobotBASIC because they had added a bunch of motion commands to it. Also, an image search at google for Intelledex will show you what some of those robots looked like. We used a 605 for the drawing.
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Gomez Addams
Ars Praetorian
No, Basic is certainly not dead. There's a guy who periodically posts about it here : Basic is not dead!
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