Hacker News Reader

Comment by khazhoux | Hacker News Reader

I have to point out an anachronism in the animated gif:

    10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
    20 GOTO 10

I don't think anyone would have typed "HELLO WORLD" on TRS-80 BASIC. That came from C lineage and wasn't popularized till later. I think you'd write "Hi" or "Hi John" or something... funny.

My first computer was a TRS-80 Model III at age 9, at my dad's work during summer vacation.

View on HN

I was in 8th grade and the library had a room with 4 or 5 TRS 80 Model 3. Students were not allowed in the room unless accompanied by a teacher.

One day in math class we watched a TV show about computers that ran that small program only the statement went across the entire screen. The teacher wheeled in one of the TRS-80s and typed in the program above and said he didn't know how to make it go across the screen like the TV show. I told him to put a semicolon at the end of line 10, which he did and it ran just like the show. After that I think I was the only student who was allowed in the computer room without supervision.

My only claim to fame with TRS 80s ;-)

Correct. It was always something like PRINT "HELLO. I AM YOUR NEW TRS-80 MICROCOMPUTER [0] or PRINT "HI, I'M YOUR NEW COLOR COMPUTER" [1]

[0] https://archive.org/details/TRS80ModelIPreliminaryUsersManua...

[1] https://ia801905.us.archive.org/30/items/Getting_Started_wit...

Yes, my GOTO demonstration was always:

   10 PRINT "STEVE ROCKS!!!!!"
   20 GOTO 10

It was definitely in the introductory BASIC teaching materials for TRS-80 and other micros.

>It was definitely in the introductory BASIC teaching materials for TRS-80 and other micros.

For 8-bit home computers of 1980s, I don't remember any of the official BASIC manuals that came with computer using "HELLO WORLD" in the examples. That includes Radio Shack TRS-80, Commodore 64, Texas Instruments TI-99, Atari 400/800, etc. Some cursory search of archived books seems to confirm my memory:

https://archive.org/details/Model_100_Basic_Language_Lab_198...

https://archive.org/details/commodore-64-user-guide/page/n47...

https://archive.org/details/tibook_beginners-basic/page/n9/m...

Maybe some unofficial 3rd-party BASIC guides or classes used the string "HELLO WORLD". I personally didn't see that until reading K&R C Language book. Although "Hello world" was 1974, it really didn't seem to spread into wide programming culture until 1990s.

I kind of vaguely remember some BASIC examples somewhere using 10 PRINT "HELLO" 20 GOTO 10... but that wasn't the full "HELLO WORLD".

AFAIK the oldest reference to "Hello World!\n" (I think it was capitalized like that) was from "The C programming language" which was released in 1978. When it popularized for home computers is harder to determine.

The first thing I printed in a loop was "poop"

I thought it was comic gold

Reply on news.ycombinator.com