Programming in BASIC on the TRS-80

Ahhh, a most timely article, from my perspective. I've recently being writing a computer game for my first computer, which was a contemporary of the trash-80 (http://www.compucolor.org/emu/ccemu.html). The guy that made the emulator was working for NVIDIA last time I talked to him, and he thoughtfully provided most of the programming manuals for Compucolor II on the site.

Why? Well I was mostly expired from a story in "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman" where he talks about being bored with physics, and he gets back into it by playing around with toy problems that he had to work out from first principles (the way that the wobble in a spinning plate precesses around the axis). So I've started programming in an emulator of this old 1980s computer. It seems to be working for me too - I'm finding myself to be much more engaged in my day job since I've started.

The REPL still lives! You need Racket. There's a lot of great programs now using Racket/WeScheme in education for younger kids.

Another project though I think really seems to be gunning for that old-school feel with some modern conveniences is PICO-8, which is a retro Lua VM meant mainly for designing games, complete with REPL, built in editors, and even PEEK and POKE. :D

To be honest though, I also kinda wonder how well you'd do just plunking a kid down in front of one of those older machines. Especially the Tandy ones. The Color Computer came with an amazing manual, that's pretty much what got me into programming all on my own as a kid.

As a fun side note, here's a Lisp in 1.5 pages of Tandy Color Basic: https://twitter.com/J_Arcane/status/668545293164683264

I've had surprising luck with doing simple Logo with my daughter (4-1/2). Actually I feel a bit guilty as she'd like to do more. So far we're just doing drawing (no loops or anything), but with all the tedium of finding the keys and getting the commands just right. I helped her make one routine that randomly changes the color, which she likes. (She named the routine after herself – kids don't need to stress over proper naming ;)

But I really wish there was material to get her started. I haven't found any introductory Logo books – finding an old book and updating it to a new dialect would be fine, but I'd appreciate some structure and thoughtfulness about the order of introduction. I probably should print out some primers too, so I don't have to remind her of RT and LT and FD every time.

I've been using this Logo interpreter: http://www.calormen.com/jslogo/ – it does all the traditional stuff pretty well, but it could also use this same sense of structure and content. A kid should be able to sit down and think: here's a thing I could try to do. And here's all the tools I need to do it. Really that's just content.

On the fancy side Hopscotch has been really impressive (significantly better than Scratch), but being iPad-only has been a problem. That said, my daughter still appreciates Logo even compared to something fancy.

(One important thing about my daughter's interest: I talk to her in detail about what I do. The importance of this occurred to me during a parent education event I was at, where they noted: when you ask your kid how their day was and they disappointingly say "fine", have you been telling them how your day was? Parents need to demonstrate that kind of storytelling and engagement, and in my experience kids suck it up more than you'd expect, even stories about seemingly boring work stuff.)

I, too, wrote my first programs on a trash-80, sitting in the store and saving the things to a high-performance cassette drive ;)

But I no longer think that's the thing...the point back then was, to me at least, "here is something big that no one else I know is doing but its so obviously very cool, empowering, and in a way, secret".

Nowadays, with so many devices intruding on every aspect of our lives, there is just very little of that secret anymore, and while of course its hard for me to know how modern tech is affecting kids nowadays, I just cannot imagine they can feel the same way as I did, sitting alone in a Radio Shack in 1978, writing BASIC programs in wonderment.

I have just started teaching my daughter to program. I would certainly agree that starting off is not nearly as easy as it used to be.

Kids love interactive and graphical environments and trying to do this in any mainstream language quickly becomes non trivial.

I chose Python and pygame but it gets confusing for the child to see things like:

   from pygame.locals import *

and

   for event in pygame.event.get():
     if event.type == QUIT:
        pygame.quit()

and

   size = (120, 640)
   screen = pygame.display.set_mode(size)   

One can tell her to ignore these and just accept they are necessary but it does cause issues and looks very intimidating to a beginner.

Scratch is the only thing I've gotten my kids interested in: https://scratch.mit.edu/

Unfortunately, it didn't last long.

Very happy memories. I spent so much time in Radio Shack when I was a teenager that it started to feel like home. Friend of mine wrote the first machine-language program I ever saw, "Mountain Mission". You basically controlled the elevation of a cannon and it shot at things on a mountain. Radio Shack put it in their software catalog. I think he made several hundred bucks.

I feel sorry for folks learning to code today. I was thinking about creating a course to teach folks to program, and it occurred to me that a more useful course might be along the lines of "How to set up and run 'hello world' in various configurations" You could have a section on each O/S, and then exercises would cover the top 5 or 6 languages.

Microcomputer BASIC is what inspired Glass Table for Gambit Scheme: https://github.com/bitwize/glasstable

It's basically a development environment you operate from the REPL. Every time you define something, GT memorizes your definition; you can then save this "workspace" of definitions to a program file or load prior work into the workspace.

It's a shame that there are almost no programming environments that work the way BASIC did, where the command language for the development toolset is the same as the programming language itself.

Neat article, I miss the simplicity of the old machines as well.

I teach a weekend programming class for middle schoolers and the setup is a real pain. There's just too much stuff that gets in the way of learning to code. Our setup is Python 3 with Pycharm EDU2 installed on each child's laptop. for some lessons we have a Raspberry Pi (gopigo and minecraft) that the kids can control remotely using Python.

We tried using Idle but it crashes too much and is a bit of a pain to navigate with the multi-window display. Pycharm EDU is pretty good, but I haven't had much luck using it with lessons. The lessons take a lot of time to setup and sometimes just crash Pycharm or become unusable, holding up class. So we use Pycharm EDU just as an IDE.

I thought of using something remote like Koding or codio (I really like these options), but we have some lessons that require us to be local so we can reach out to our bot and rpi. A more lightweight IDE would be nice, something with nice debug capability like Pycharm EDU. These kids are sporting some really old laptops, hammy downs from older siblings mostly. Ideas welcome.

>> I can’t help but feel a little sad at how much harder it is to learn to program today.

>> Back then, with a few lines of code I could write a program that ran on practically any home computer.

Pop open Chrome and you can write almost the same program from that magazine in Javascript. You'll have to figure out how to do the input, though.

Magazines like Linux Format even have multi-page coding tutorials for different languages all the time.

http://www.linuxformat.com/archives&listpdfs=1

>> There’s so many more steps to reach “Hello World” in any of today’s major languages

>> There’s also so much more distraction. With no Internet, no video games

There were TONS of games for the TRS-80. I used to sit in Radio Shack as a kid playing them all day long. You didn't have the Internet back then but you could dial into BBS's. That was a real time-waster.

Basic is still alive and well, providing a simple programming environment for beginners.

It has returned to being a hobbyist scene, just like in the 80s. Basic compilers are written by hobbyists for hobbyists.

For native applications my favourite is PureBasic: http://www.purebasic.com/

It's a nice variant that compiles to a tiny, dependency free executables for Windows, Linux and OSX.

It also provides a nice gateway to the underlying assembler. http://www.purebasic.com/documentation/reference/inlinedasm....

It also has an online version called Spider Basic that compiles to JavaScript: http://www.spiderbasic.com/

I remember typing in games on the TI-99/4A without understanding how to edit a program in TI Basic. If I mistyped I couldn't go back and edit the line so was screwed. With some guidance back in the day I would have had a lot more fun.

I remember as a teenager in the mid 2000s my sweet old grandmother gave me this book she found lying around because she didn't understand it but she knows I'm into "those computer things". It was the manual that came with the TRS 80 explaining how to use BASIC. It came with some example programs. It was an amusing glimpse into a bygone era but ultimately I declared the book to be hopelessly outdated trash. I kind of wish I had kept it.

Somewhere around 1991 or so we got a 386SX with DOS and Q-BASIC. Here I was stuck with all these Apple II and Commodore books from the library, most of the games wouldn't work because the peeks and pokes and functions that weren't available.

I later found some GW-BASIC books which helped a little bit, but I wish the library had some newer stuff. C compilers were $500 back then so BASIC was all I had.

Wow nostalgia taking me back to learning level 1 basic on a TRS-80 Model I at the Radio Shack store.

But the ease of learning BASIC is alive and well today, you can write a PHP program with as much ease (then you can learn to write better code later but the point is the barrier to entry is very very low).

You can even run PHP as an interpreter in a DOS-like command window in Windows, very easy.

  POKE 16407, 43

This wrote a value into an absolute memory address. 16407 was one of the registers of the video controller. Poking various values into it would cause various funky things to happen on screen. 43 was one of the best values to put in there, but others were interesting too.

Sometimes you had to reboot the machine to recover, though...

My second computer (after the Timex Sinclair 1000) was a TRS-80 MC-10. I liked that it had the same BASIC commands mapped to keys like the TS/1000 and so it was a great upgrade into a computer that had colour and sound... and since I was 6 the small keyboard was okay =)

The first computer I had access to and learned to program on :)

Oh, this is fun. Nice piece.

Time to turn my Apple 2e on and play for a while.