Way back in the the late ’70s and early ’80s, as PCs were becoming more popular as consumer devices, the programming language of the time was BASIC, which was an acronym for ‘Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.’ It’s a cumbersome name, but it was the layman’s first exposure to programming and to what it could do, and it was easier to understand than the Assembly code that was used by serious programmers, and it’s even more understandable than the languages we have today such as C# (pronounced “C sharp”) and Java.

It used line numbers in front of every line, usually incremented by 10, so  program might look like:

10 print “Hello World!”;
20 GOTO 10

This program would print the phrase ‘Hello World’ over and over until you stopped it. If you needed to add a line between the two that comprise this program, you could preface it with any number between 11 and 19, but if you needed more than that you were in trouble.

BASIC programs could be very complex, as you can see here. In fact, one of the earliest graphics-capable adventure games ever created for the computer, back in 1979 and on an Apple IIe – while not looking like much – was created entirely in BASIC; it’s still considered a programming triumph. Back then we’d never seen anything like it, and it shows the power of the language in capable hands. You can see it in all its glory below.

However, if you are interested, you can experiment with BASIC programming yourself at the Quite Basic website. I’ll even give you a program to start with.

When you first visit the site, you’ll see a program already typed in, and if you’s like to see what it does you can hit the ‘play’ button right above the code window and it will draw some circles. Or, you can delete all the green code in the text window and type this instead:

10 input “What is your name?”; n
20 print “Well hello there, “; n; “!”

If you type this in the window, then hit the play button right above the window, you will be prompted for your name, and when you type it in it will respond with “Well hello there [you]!”.

You can experiment with it, the site is rich with information and examples, you can even create and save projects if you’re so inclined. The complex program I linked to earlier didn’t work quite right due to some compatibility issues, but I’m working through it to see if I can get it up and running.