The BASICs of Computer Programming.
Whenever I hear people calling ASP a ‘classic computer language’, I cannot help but chuckle to myself. Why? Well, because I am old enough to remember a far more ‘classic computer language’, that’s why! Back when I was in my early teens we used something called ‘Basic’ to write our programs (this was even employed for game making purposes at the time!). And believe me, Basic made ASP look like something from the very distant future!!! Oh, people have it all so easy today yet they don’t even know it!
Basic was really, really… well, basic. It was slow, lumpy and completely unreliable most of the time! However, in the days of the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64, Basic was seen as being totally ‘cutting edge’. This seems completely ridiculous now, but I promise that I’m not winding you up…
When it came to programming in Basic you had to write reams of stuff to achieve any results whatsoever. For instance, if you wanted to print a message on the screen and then get it to repeat this process, it would look something like this –
10 PRINT ‘THIS IS A BLOG POST ABOUT BASIC!'
20 GOTO 10
30 STOP
Every single line of your program had to be preceded by a line number. Your computer would begin at the top and work downwards one line at a time. Simples. Until you typed the very slightest thing in error that is… A single comma or full stop in the wrong place would usually cause the whole of your program to come to a complete and utter halt. And, worst of all, it could take hours to track down this one single typo!
To put it in a nutshell, Basic was as reliable as a 1980s Skoda and about as exciting as a horse insurance salesman. Thank goodness things have moved on. If they hadn’t, then computers would have died a death many moons ago!
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