It's hard to overstate the impact of BASIC on the first generation of people who grew up with computers in the home instead of encountering them only later in a time-sharing environment with professional operators and administrators.

This is not because BASIC was a high quality language, especially as stripped down by Microsoft and other implementors.

Everybody knew there were bigger, better, or faster languages out there, but they were priced commercially and marketed at professionals.

At one time, it was considered good sport to ridicule people whose first programming language was BASIC;

after a while I figured out that this was a form of hazing, similar to the snotty attitudes adopted by a subset of student employees

This was a fun rat-hole. (My first programming was Edu-24 BASIC on a pdp-8/e my 7-12 school had.) It appears that the DEC-10 BASIC is earlier, at least according to how I intuit the timeline from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC-8

On Mon, Nov 15, 2021 at 11:09 PM G. Branden Robinson &lt;g.branden.robinson(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: It's hard to overstate the impact of BASIC on the first generation of people who grew up with computers in the home instead of encountering them only later in a time-sharing environment with professional operators and administrators. FWIW:   A number of us learned BASIC in the late 1960s/early 1970s (/i.e./ before the microprocessor versions ever appeared as they did not yet exist).  Gates & Allen used it in HS on a PDP-10 with an ASR-33, and I'm their same age.   I did the same thing in JHS and HS on a GE-635 [Mark-II DTSS] and then later HP2000 [Community Computer Services] - 10 cps baby, upper case only. What I don't know is if the PDP-8 BASIC came before the PDP-10 version.   But the point is that most of the mini's (nomatter the manufacturer) had an implementation of BASICin the late 60s and early 1970s, long before the micro's came on the scene.  I would later get to know/work with a number of the people in DEC languages groups and I do know that the syntax and semantics of the BASIC for RSTS implementation originally was based on the PDP-10 BASIC (although they did have some differences). In fact, DEC's RSTS/11 and the HP/2100 running BASIC were the two systems that ended up being used by a lot of small timesharing shops and eventually on-site at the high schools that could afford the HW. The reason being that BASIC became popular on the small system was it required fewer resources and because it was primarily interpreted matched.  An urban legend is that when Gates opened in Microsoft in AZ, he bartered time from the local high school running their RSTS system for them in return for being able to use it as their development system [I definitely know that he used their system, I'm just now sure how he renumerated them for the computer time]. This is not because BASIC was a high quality language, especially as stripped down by Microsoft and other implementors. It made perfect sense when Gates decided to implement it for the Altair.   And he modeled his version on the DEC syntax and semantics - because that was what he knew was used to from the PDP-10, and what he and Paul had learned first. Everybody knew there were bigger, better, or faster languages out there, but they were priced commercially and marketed at professionals. And more importantly, /requires many more resources/.  Consider UCSD-Pascal, you needed a disk-based system to run it, be an LSI-11, Apple-IIe, or CP/M box.  The BASIC's often worked out of ROM.  Hey, I can think of implementations of other languages such as FORTRAN's, C, Cobol, PL/M, PL/1, and eventually many Pascals for the different micro's, but they all took more HW to support the edit/compile/link cycle. The point is that for a >>hobbyist<<, running BASIC was 'good enough.'  The only HS in the late 1970s that I knew that could afford a PDP 11/45 and actually ran UNIX on it, was Lincoln-Sudbury - which is in a high-end suburban Boston.  They also had a lot of help from parents who per professionals here in Boston working for places like DEC, DG, Pr1me, Honeywell, and the like.   At that time, I was long gone, but I now my father at my own prep school in suburban Philadelphia dreamed of an 11/40 class system to run RSTS, but they could not afford it. So if they wanted off a timesharing service like the HP/21000, they bought small microprocessor (CP/M or Apple-II) gear and ran them as a hobbyist would. At one time, it was considered good sport to ridicule people whose firstprogramming language was BASIC; I'm not so much sure it was that their first language was BASIC, as much as they did not go beyond it.   I will say that once the HW started to be able to support more complete languages (such as Pascal), there was some of that.  I used to say the problem was that they probably learned it in HS and their teachers did know more. My own father (who taught me BASIC on the GE-635 when I was in JHS), knew only BASIC and FORTRAN because that was what he had learned working part-time as a 'computer' at Rocketdyne in the late 1950s/early 1960s.   By the late 60s, he was the first 'computer teacher' at the prep school when I went (in Philadelphia, but not that dissimilar to Bill Gates's experiences in Seattle at a local prep school there). He taught us what he knew and /what he had access to/. Eventually, I outpaced him a bit, and I started to learn a little assembler for the HP because I was curious. But I came to a point where I knew way more than he did before I left HS [BTW: Gates and Allen tell a similar story - of learning PDP-10 assembler at some point -- advancing ahead of their teachers].  The truth is I think my Dad was a bit ahead of his time, /but he did not know what he did not know /and did know to try to teach others anything other than BASIC and FORTRAN/./ FWIW: I went to CMU and had to be re-taught - being introduced to Algol, real FORTRAN, IBM Assembler, APL (and eventually many of other wonders). BTW: By the mid/late '70s, I had taught my Dad Pascal so he could use it with USCD-Pascal with his 'advanced students' now that he had a few Apple-IIe's that could run it. after a while I figured out that thiswas a form of hazing, similar to the snotty attitudes adopted by a subset of student employees Point taken... and I there probably was a lot of those, particularly later once the HW ability and cost available made it possible to have a choice. But the problem was that most of the young people had come from places where the educators that taught them BASIC did not know better even if they had had enough HW to do it. Unfortunately, because the hobbyist and much of the press for entry-level of the same, touted BASIC, many did not know better.   The fact is I'm still now sure the HS and JHS are a lot better than they were. I'll let Steinhart reply, but he wrote an excellent book recently targeted to just those same students that what to know more, but frankly their HS teachers really are not in a position to teach them properly. Clem ᐧ

Not so much.  Bywater Basic (bwbasic), which is a much-extended clone of GW-Basic, and a clone of Commodore-64 Basic (cbmbasic) are both open source, TTY-oriented, and portable to most operating systems and Windows.  There are lots of other Basics around: see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BASIC_dialects>.

Clem Cole writes: Well thanks Clem :-) I didn't actually hit BASIC until college where freshmen had to learn it on the PDP-8. Took me all of about 5 minutes to learn the language and about a half a day to do the entire semester of coursework. Got me off to a good start on annoying my professors. I think that my first programming language was SNAP running on a PDP8-E in the (I don't remember the exact name) Princeton computer barn. Because my dad worked at IBM I remember going over to his VP's house to learn APL on his home terminal. FORTRAN on I think an IBM 1620 was next. After that was Heinz's FSNAP on the Honeywell DDP-516 at BTL. Never thought to ask before, Heinz - was FSNAP based on SNAP? Assembler came after that, followed by C. I know, what's the difference? Then Pascal in college which was dreadful after C. I asked my professor to give me a few pointers on how to program with fixed length arrays but he couldn't give me any :-) It's my opinion that BASIC was a good thing in its day but that that time has passed. Part of what made it the goto language was its simplicity; there wasn't much to learn and there was no complex toolchain so time was spend on figuring out how to structure a problem so that it could be solved on a computer. In my not very humble opinion, this is the fundamental (or should I say basic) problem with CS education today; the effort is focused on learning the language and the toolchain, not how to think and solve problems. Somehow many of us learned to program in BASIC without a "Hello World" tutorial. Another big factor in those days was that the consequences for getting something wrong were pretty much nonexistent. What was the worst that could happen, you'd accidentally output an obscenity? Give what computers were used for back then, getting the math wrong was more likely than having a logic error. I didn't have to worry about buggy code destroying anything until a project where I modified FSNAP to control semiconductor test equipment. I have tried when mentoring to get people to start with simple character oriented programs but of course everyone (especially boys) want to start with a video game. This immediately means having to deal with multithreaded code (even if it's somewhat hidden) and complex APIs. All of this is a distraction from learning how to think and solve problems. As a result, we're producing a lot of "programmers" who can wrangle this stuff while having no idea how to solve a problem. I think that a glance at stackoverflow backs me up here. It's extremely frustrating: "I want to write a video game where I can shoot something." "Cool. Let's learn some physics." "I don't want to learn physics, I want to shoot something." As an aside, I saw an article recently where someone was lauding the github "AI" code writing thing. The author wrote something like "Wow. I asked it to replace spaces in a string with underscores and it just gave me the code." Arrrrggggghhhh!!! IMNVHO this person should never be allowed near a computer. If you can't do this without help you shouldn't be programming. Like usual, I'm rambling, but one more related thing. I'm mentoring a CS student who has to do a project this year. My advice was that I didn't care what the project actually did, but that it should be based on an Arduino and written in C and assembler without any of the sketch library stuff. The goal being to learn to read a data sheet, program I/O devices, and handle interrupts. All on a processor that's not too complicated. Jon