5 May
2005
5 May
'05
3:09 p.m.
On Thursday 05 May 2005 11:45, woodelf wrote:
Patrick Finnegan wrote:
I think most of the people that collect late 70s and 80s microcomputers
here will disagree with you on that one (along with people that used
timesharing basics on minicomputers of the 70s).
Personally, I first learned to write programs in BASIC on Apple ][e's
when I was in grade school. Shortly after that came playing with
gwbasic on the machine we had at home, and then using DEBUG to write
assembly code, and then a combination of QuickBASIC and MASM to finally
be able to write "real" programs (well, stuff that ended up as machine
code in EXE files).
Man, I miss my excursions in DEBUG some times. DEBUG taught me what
happened when you lowered the memory refresh rate - when memory on PCs
was still refreshed via a DMA channel - by too much. :)
Erm, you seem to have left out BASIC, one version
of which didn't
require you to have disks to use (ROM BASIC); however, that was
probably more useful on the 5150 PC than the 5160 PC/XT since the
PC had a cassette interface you could use with it, which the XT
lacks.
Well I don't consider BASIC a programing langauge ... I consider it a
curse on mankind. I had forgot about BASIC but I was thinking of
langauges that came on a floppy.
BASIC did come on a floppy as well... GWBASIC in MS-DOS and
BASIC.COM/BASICA.COM in IBM-DOS (which used ROM BASIC to provide most
of the functionality).
Pat
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