60 Years Of Basic
Say Hello World To Three New Versions
May 1st was officially the 60th birthday of BASIC, what for many of us was one of the first programming languages we ever tried. It has changed and grown over the years and while it has mostly been replaced with more powerful modern languages, BASIC never did completely go away. Indeed it inspired numerous other versions to be designed over the years, most of which were not particularly compatible with the other versions.
In celebration the BASIC family grew on it’s birthday, with three new versions arriving for those interested in trying them out. Small Visual Basic has been around for about 10 years, it brought a GUI to Microsoft’s FOSS and it’s third version was just released. Chloe 280SE System 1 and SE BASIC 4.2 are for those who program on ZX Spectrum emulators and finally, QB64 Phoenix has a brand new fork to explore.
The Register reminisces about the old becoming new again here.
May Day 2024 was the 60th anniversary of the BASIC programming language, and multiple FOSS BASIC-related projects released new versions in celebration.
10 PRINT “Can old school BASIC even be called a coding language? I know that you can write programs in it, but those programs were more of an ordered use of function rather that a creation of function. If you take the old BASIC from the micro-computer era and compare it to modern software it’s much closer to a user interface than it is to a code language. Just Sayin”
20 GOTO 10