2 May
2024
2 May
'24
9 a.m.
Gavin Scott via cctalk [02/05/2024 05.44]:
BASIC was always a popular language in the
Hewlett-Packard world. From
the HP 2000 timesharing BASIC that was popular in educational settings
similar to the original DTSS, To BASIC/3000 on the HP 3000 which was a
first-class language with both interpreter and compiler (producing
very fast code), to the HP 250/260 which used BASIC as their primary
development language, Rocky Mountain BASIC in the technical world, the
Series 80 microcomputers, HP Business Basic again on the 3000 which
was probably largest and most complex language system ever created for
the Classic 16-bit 3000 systems and which was intended to be both a
migration path for 250/260 applications to MPE and to be a new
standard Basic across multiple HP platforms.
I learned programming in BASIC/3000 in the early 80s. The biggest
problem with that language was that you could only have short variable
names (1 letter + one digit, if I remember right).
I and two other students wrote kind of an inventory management system
for a Norwegian company as a project in class. Oh, the fun of
remembering what the variable names were in a program of some thousand
lines...
I actually preferred the BASIC on my Commodore 64, especially when I got
the Simons' BASIC cartridge.
--
Hilsen Harald