Simple Computing

To celebrate 50+ years of BASIC, I've published an early version of the classic simulation, Hammurabi, on the Run Basic Hosting site. It ran "almost" unchanged -- line numbers, GOTOs and all. I'll publish the tweaked Run Basic code later, but here is the link to the game if you want to try it out right away. If you're interested in the original source, here is a nice article on the game at the Atari Archives. Have fun!

Well, the BASIC language actually turned 50 on May 1, 2014, and I'm very late to the party. Born at Dartmouth in 1964 (along with the first commercial time sharing), here is the university's tribute page . There is even a great 38 minute documentary that they made for the occasion. 10 PRINT "ENJOY" 20 GOTO 10

A competitor to Liberty Basic from across the pond entered my radar in recent months. It's called BBC Basic for Windows and it's maintained by Richard T. Russell -- a sort of British Carl Gundel. I was sufficiently impressed to buy a license and try it out as a testing tool for a project. BBC Basic has a rich history that involves the BBC Micro and Acorn computers. The history of Acorn Computers parallels that of famous American companies like Apple and Commodore . BBC Basic for Windows is a little more complicated than Liberty Basic, but it is also much faster and more powerful. I'll post updated Sieve benchmarks comparing Liberty Basic, Run Basic and BBC Basic in coming weeks. Liberty Basic and Run Basic were developed with different tools and differing philosophies: Liberty Basic was written in Smalltalk and has some of Smalltalk characteristics like big strings and really big integers. To understand what I mean, open a workspace in Squeak Smalltalk and evaluate the...

My wanderings today took me back to the beginning of the personal computer revolution: the MITS Altair kit computer. Click here for a look at Altair Basic. This was Bill and Paul's first BASIC language product at a time when Microsoft Corporation was called Micro-Soft. Check out the scans of the original manual as well as Bill Gate's complaint about hobbyist piracy in a 1976 issue of Radio Electronics. Some things change and some things remain the same.