Rocky Mountain Basic | Hacker News Reader

Rocky Mountain Basic

en.wikipedia.org

55 pointsmattowen_uk22 comments

I had no idea what programming was when I was 12 but I was very interested in Computers. Back then there was no Internet here in India so I used to explore every feature of Windows 98/ME and all the Software installed. What always intrigued me was how these .exe files are created because I could create every other file like(.bmp, .jpg, .doc, etc,.) with the Software installed but not .exe

We had IT in our school but all they taught was how to use word, excel and skipped this chapter in book which was "Programming with QBasic". I did not touch that chapter because it did not have fancy screenshots like other chapter and seemed boring. I use to think Command prompt was a dumb Software and this chapter had one screenshot of cmd.

And then one day I took a closer look at that screenshot. It had 2 window screenshots, the window on the left had

    10 INPUT "ENTER ANY NUMBER: ", N
    20 FOR I = 1 TO 10
    30 PRINT N,"X",I,"=",N*I
    40 NEXT I

The window on right, was showing a prompt for "ENTER ANY NUMBER: " 8.

Entire table of 8 was printed below. I was blown away. I had never seen computer doing what I tell it to until then and honestly it was like I found a super power that day. Soon I realized that my dad who is headmaster and nothing to do with programming has 1 thick book on "Programming with GWBASIC" from his school, needless to say I read that entire book within few days. That started my journey into Software Development. I am so glad today that I took a closer look at that screenshot. I still could not generate .exe back then because those compilers were hard to come by but finally my buddy who had access to Internet got me the compiler and I generated .exe. It felt amazing.

tl;dr I owe my Software Development career to BASIC.

When I logged into my first dial-up BBS, I had no idea what to use as my handle. My manual for GWBasic was sitting in front of me.

25 years later I'm GWBas1c on Hacker news.

Damn, I should have been C64SysRef.

I should have been loadquotestarquotecomma8comma1.

The password i used for CompuServe was my modem model number. Same reason.

That is about the most "HN" comment I have ever read (or at least "nerd", in the positive sense).

I had a similar experience. I was around 12, had a ZX Spectum and wrote a couple of lines to draw a circle on the TV. I was amazed too at this new super power, where I could "tell my TV" where to draw a circle just by changing a couple of numbers.

Ironically, as developing software becomes increasingly complex, I feel more and more like it's the machine telling me what to do XD

Similar age for me, also with a ZX Spectrum - I guess that dates us, and our location pretty well.

I've posted this before, but it's always a fun trip down memory-lane:

https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html

In a way I do too. I learned BASIC as a child, before learning any “real” language or domain. I talk to people who are starting from scratch with JavaScript and I try to convince them to start with Scheme or something instead, because starting with something that just taught me the ideas of programming, without doing anything truly useful, turned out to be a huge advantage later on in life. I didn’t think about the browser, the DOM, the operating system, or any real-world use case, just 20 GOTO 10 and getting the computer to print silly words.

One of my first program was something like:

- What is your name?

- <name> is dumb, haha

Me too. One time I messed with my friend by adding a conditional to complement every name except his.

10 PRINT "WHAT IS YOUR NAME"; 20 INPUT NAME$ 30 IF NAME$ = "BILL" THEN 40 PRINT NAME$+" SOUNDS LIKE A NAME FOR A DORK!" 50 ELSE 60 PRINT NAME$+" SOUNDS LIKE A GREAT NAME!" 70 END IF

I also tried to prank people with a program I wrote that mimicked a BSOD, but I couldn't get anyone to fall for it.

PS- No hard feelings between me and NAME$, one of the few high school friends I still spend time with. He still remembers the program and laughs.

Formatted version (HN supports code sections by indenting 4 spaces):

    10 PRINT "WHAT IS YOUR NAME";
    20 INPUT NAME$
    30 IF NAME$ = "BILL" THEN
    40 PRINT NAME$+" SOUNDS LIKE A NAME FOR A DORK!"
    50 ELSE
    60 PRINT NAME$+" SOUNDS LIKE A GREAT NAME!"
    70 END IF

Ooh, didn't know about the newlines not printing as typed. Thanks for the tip!

Ha, I too found the GWBASIC manual at home in a bookshelf and just read it. Afterwards I asked my father whether he had GWBASIC somewhere and he provided me with QBasic, which had integrated help (so I didn't have to refer to that 500-page tome). From there I eventually went to Turbo Pascal and later Visual Basic and much later to lots of other languages.

I still wonder sometimes what the modern equivalent to learn programming would be. Most modern programming languages are infinitely more capable, but the hurdle to start is also a lot higher in many cases. JavaScript is probably equivalent in that it's available everywhere, but there's so much you have to at least understand a bit before you can really write some code ...

When I was really young, I opened a few .exe files in Notepad to try to figure out how they were created. I remember at one point seeing all of the garbage character output and thought, "wow, someone wrote and understands all of this?"

Conversely, I didn't have much luck renaming my basic programs to .exe.

this is how I switched from GW-BASIC to QuickBASIC. I found out that QB could make .exe files like a big boy compiler.

Switching to QuickBASIC was like stepping into the future, coming from GW-BASIC. No more line numbers. Actual subroutines. A quite nice IDE that separates out subroutines similar to the code browser in Smalltalk/Squeak.

In the mid 2000s I worked at company that used Rocky Mountain Basic in a ton of their products (electrical test equipment.) Most of their product lines dated back to 1960s and 1970s, and the software portions consisted of assembler, Fortran, C, and Basic. We were in the middle of a project porting some older Basic code to RMB when the division was shutdown due to 2008 financial crisis. (It effectively killed some parts of the industry for a few years.)

Sadly, a lot of the really old code was much easier to maintain than most of the code I work on today. The company had an excellent engineering culture, and thorough design and documentation was the norm rather than the exception.

After college I was doing some consulting and working on few very different projects. One of which was helping a company maintain an estimating program written by their founding engineer written in RMB. The software would prompt the user for various information and produce an estimate for labor, materials, equipment, and time.

It was pretty simple, well commented code, and for a while I was able to make small changes with a VM and HTBasic (http://www.techsoft.de/documents/htbasic.html). They weren't using any of the advanced features of the language. It was essentially a cli.

Eventually we ported it to TypeScript with a modern frontend. Now they can do estimates in the field and integrate it with loads of other software they adopted recently for invoicing, scheduling etc.

Occasionally, I'll use an old piece of test equipment at work that has GPIB. I'll pull up the manual for commands and there will be BASIC code examples.

The newest boxes from Keysight (formerly Agilent formerly HP) that run Windows use C# for macros. But you really don't need to use it if you have the box networked and send SCPI commands to it.

One of the computers that used RMB was the HP 9845. This computer had a CRT display that could draw up to 4096 colors, which was phenomenal at the time. It was used to do scientific visualizations and stuff; Colin Cantwell consulted on its design, and used it to create the NORAD graphics in WarGames.

In fall 1975 in my senior year of High school, I toured the local Junior College (Vanier CEGEP) and saw a lab with a HP 9830A driving a HP flatbed plotter producing Biorhythm plots. I applied to that college and a year later the lab become my second home. I learned the 9830A Rocky Mountain Basic, wrote and shared many program on cassette tapes. The most fun was shared game we called Cosmic Pinball. Shells fired at static planets with the ballistic plots drawn out on the flatbed plotter. Longest run took 18 minutes before it finally hit 1 of the 7 planets. I should rewrite it in python.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com