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The Golden Age of Basic

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"... general purpose home computers were replaced in the late 1980s by game consoles for those interested only in entertainment, or by PCs and Macs for those looking for more serious applications. None of these replacements were easily programmable. And while cheap and easy ways to code would eventually become generally available again for children and teens, learning how to program would never regain the place in popular culture it held in the 1980s. The Golden Age of Basic was over."

I'm not sure about Macs, but PC-DOS/MS-DOS came with BASIC/BASICA[1] or GWBASIC[2] (or QBASIC[3] in the 90s with MS-DOS 5.0). I wrote a bunch of little fun programs when I was 12-13 in the BASIC that came with DOS.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_BASICA [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic

To this day I credit Nibbles and QBASIC in MSDOS for getting me started in programming. This was a little later than the 80s (QBASIC was introduced in 1991). As a bored computer savvy kid discovering a game installed on my computer and realizing that I could change the game was all it took to eat up hours of fun.

In the late 1980's the Commodore 64 in the home was probably not being replaced by a Mac, but because of price by some version of the Apple II. This was the GOTO product for home and education into the early 1990's.

In the late 1980's Apple was selling Mac SE's at close to $3000 list price and Mac II's at $5500 list. These were targeted at business customers with prices comparable to the bottom end 8088 IBM PS/2 and top 80286 PS/2 respectively.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Apple_II_Family

https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1987-06/1987_06_BYT...

By that time the cheap Taiwanese PC clones were already more affordable than Apple 2s. My first computer was a "turbo xt", the likes of which were selling for less than $1000 by the mid/late 1980s:

http://books.google.de/books?id=Vi8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA30

http://books.google.de/books?id=Vy8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA54

Don't remember seeing many macs, most other kids had PCs too by the end of the 80s (my parents bought one in '87). I understand the apple2 was more popular in America though due to Apple pushing very aggresively into the school market.

Not to disagree, but Apple had very steep educational discounts. My example: Mac SE with harddisk, ImageWriter II, Microsoft Word, and some other software for $2500. Macs were everywhere in higher education (except the business school).

My impression is most of the home computing scene largely moved over to Amigas and Atari STs.

The Amiga had several good BASICs, particularly AMOS and Blitz Basic. Blitz was very powerful and fun to program. You could easily drop beneath the provided commands and access the OS and hardware beneath. It had well-integrated inline assembly. I ended up using it as an assembler with the BASIC facilities for support.

The first game in Team 17's long running Worms franchise was written in Blitz.

I remember Apple IIs of the late 80s/early 90s being "not exactly cheap" either, in comparison to c64s.

I used to walk up to the computer kiosks in RadioShack mall storefronts, write a quick loop saying "Joe was here", hit Return and run away. It was glorious.

I used to make program loops that were appropriately obscene for a 12 yr old, snigger at the clerk trying to cope with what I did (I was 12), then run off.

Woohoo - that was me, except it was the Atari 600xl that a really nice uncle shipped to me :). Far too much time spent pounding out basic programs on that crap keyboard and learning about the intricacies of the hardware (GTIA chip!)

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