Vintage Programming Languages

[Mikey405]

Originally Posted by Sean Williams

Ah Logo,

I remember doing that at school, on something called a link computer?

Couldnt have made much of an impression though!

Had a play with basic on the VIC20 as well, poke 259 sticks in my mind for some strange reason........cannot remember what that particular code did though!

Cheers
Sean

Blissfully ignorant of all programming languages!

Hi Sean.

I remember the RM "Link" 480Z machines. We had a few of those at school along with some huge black 380Z machines, although they were being mostly replaced with the Intel 80186 based RM Nimbuses with their wonderful "RM Basic".

My favourite programming language was GW-BASIC - I still use it for writing quick-and-dirty programs to read, write and modify CSV or other similar such sequential files etc. I liked Microsoft Q-Basic and Quick-Basic too. Just recently I've been playing with Microsoft Powershell, but I guess that's a bit modern for a thread about "Vintage" languages.

On my ZX Spectrum I had a couple of programming languages, one which was called Forth which worked very much like those old fashioned calculators - You "Pushed" the numbers or whatever you wanted to work with on to the stack, you ran the function and then you "Pop"d the answer back out. Or something like that anyway. I tried another one on the ZX Spectrum called IDEAL, which stood for Interrupt Driven Extended Animation Language. It was pretty reasonable for writing games, but that was about it really.

We still use COBOL at work on our ICL / Fujitsu Super-Nova mainframe. I think it's the same version that we have had since our ICL 2900 many many years ago.

Does anyone remember the ICL DRS20? That had a version of Microsoft basic very similar to BASICA (an old non-graphical version of GW Basic).

From Mike.

[paulsherwin]

Originally Posted by Mikey405

I remember the RM "Link" 480Z machines. We had a few of those at school along with some huge black 380Z machines, although they were being mostly replaced with the Intel 80186 based RM Nimbuses with their wonderful "RM Basic".

I used a Research Machines 380Z as a graduate student around 1979. RM were a proper computer company then, building micros for the top end of the educational sector. After the mid 80s they seem to have mutated into a dodgy marketing operation, convincing the local government educational sector that *their* PC clones were somehow specially designed for educational requirements thus justifying the higher prices

They still sell shedloads of kit to schools even today

As for 2900s, I don't like to think about those, I still have the odd nightmare about them

Paul

[quantum]

Originally Posted by Mikey405

Does anyone remember the ICL DRS20? That had a version of Microsoft basic very similar to BASICA (an old non-graphical version of GW Basic).

I remember the old MS Basic; in an age of computers which weren't true IBM compatibles the lack of graphics capability meant that it would transfer fairly easily between machines. I remember buying some old CAL PC machines from my local college in 1989/90 - they had cost about £2000 each when new and I bought several for my friends at £50 each (they were about 5-6 years old). These were combined Z80/8088 PCs and would run a version of DOS and CP/M also, but were not anything like true IBM compatibles, but MS Basic, COBOL and even MS Forth would run on them. Programmes-wise we had to use non-graphics stuff also, so DBase II, SuperCalc II and Wordstar III were fine, but not much else was!