re:ha ha ha BASIC!

Hugh,

Well I've also got two Altair's, and a Godbout, but I haven't ran them
for quite a while. Waiting for the 800 MHz Pentium terminal! ;>)

Alan

PS, yes it was a rev 4.0 Altair BASIC on paper tape! Now where did I
put that boot loader code?


Hugh Prescott wrote:

>
> > Well, when I refer to 'basic' I'm thinking of some of the old, 8-bit
> > micro basics from the late 70's. Some of them were pretty laughable,
> > like no variables passed to subroutines, 26 variables (A-Z) all global,
> > one cryptic command per numbered line, etc. GAG! Yes, I know
> > there are basics now that are vastly ahead of what was available
> > 20+ years ago on the limited computers of that era.
>
> Interesting that the second version of B. Gates & Company's BASIC (8K tape)
> for the Altair had none of these limitations. You did have the option of not
> loading the Floating Point package when you loaded the tape.
>
> Altair Disk Extended BASIC had all of the features of BASICA and GWBASIC of
> the MS-DOS world. After moving to the Mod 3 and then to the MS-DOS world it
> was "weird" to have a DOS separated from the BASIC.
>
> Except for a few keywords programs could be moved from 8K & Disk Extended to
> MOD 3 BASIC and then on to the MS-DOS GW-BASIC and then to Visual Basic for
> DOS. My how much easier it got.
>
> The first programming language you learn will always be you favorite / fall
> back language
>
> Hugh
> Two Altairs and one IMSI still running with a Pentium 800 for a terminal.
>