Fifty Years of Basic

I learnt Basic as a sixth former at Guildford Technology College in the mid-1970s. The main computer languages taught on our course were Fortran and a smattering on Cobol. To work with these we would code on sheets of specially marked paper then transfer the code to punch cards, bundle them up, send them to the computer room then come back a few hours later or maybe the next day to pick up the paper print outs.

Basic was quite different. We entered our programs on a Teletype machine linked to the Open University and get a response in minutes. Back then it felt like the future.

The skills picked up at Guildford Tech helped me get a job on Practical Computing magazine and later writing for Your Computer. When I got there, Basic was everywhere.

The language was a huge deal in the early days of personal computers. Microcomputers had the language effectively hardwired in Roms, in effect Basic was also the operating system, so when the first disc-based PCs came along it was a natural choice.

Originally posted on Time:

Knowing how to program a computer is good for you, and it’s a shame more people don’t learn to do it.

For years now, that’s been a hugely popular stance. It’s led to educational initiatives as effortless sounding as the Hour of Code (offered by Code.org) and as obviously ambitious as Code Year (spearheaded by Codecademy).

Even President Obama has chimed in. Last December, he issued a YouTube video in which he urged young people to take up programming, declaring that “learning these skills isn’t just important for your future, it’s important for our country’s future.”

I find the “everybody should learn to code” movement laudable. And yet it also leaves me wistful, even melancholy. Once upon a time, knowing how to use a computer was virtually synonymous with knowing how to program one. And the thing that made it possible was a programming language called Basic.