So who's the new old guy?

[Pete]

MS gave away a lot of copies of .net 10+ years ago. I got a download. I use it as a planter. That might come in handy when all that MS money Gates came by is used to buy up even more farm land, and we have to listen to all the oligarchs tell us to eat bugs.

Pete

I’m trying to figure out how this BB works. Where will this post show up? Lol

When you figure it out, let me know!

Kidding aside, have fun with it. Try stuff. You can edit most anything that doesn't come out right, and there is no time limit to edit a post. Note: if you want to make an animated avatar, use an online optimizer to cut down on the size, if needed. Too many KB and the system ignores the animation.

Pete

[bobalooie]

Wow great to have both you young'ns on board, nice experience both!

I started at college with punch cards for Cobol and Fortran?, then some sort of Unix Basic over what I call dummy terminals.
12 years later my own PC with DOS 3.1 if I recall on 8088, starting with GW-BASIC, then 496 DOS 5 and 6? and QB4.5, VB 2.0, VB DOS (the best then!) on Windows 3.1 (still a little too slow for graphics and Windows) mid 90's.

Ahh, punch cards. I started in high school with Fortran on punch cards and an IBM 1130. Then we had terminals and a connection to a PDP-11.

[bobalooie]

Well, it's gratifying to see so many folks here are in my demographic. Started in high school (1976!) on an IBM 1130 and punch cards before we got connected to Xavier U's PDP-11. Coming out of high school I worked at a Radio Shack store, so we always had the current 'delux' TRS-80 system in the store to play with after hours. Went through GW-Basic, QBasic, VB-DOS, Visual Basic 6.0. On the side I also explored XBasic for a while. I am doing projects now in FreeBasic and QB64pe as well as on my Model 4P, strictly for myself.

[bplus]

Wow it's great to see all this experience we have in our membership!

Now instead of being up all night coding, I find myself getting up early eg this post!

[Pete]

Well you can get back to coding at 4:00PM. That's when we're all eating dinner! Dammit, misplaced my teeth again. Oh well, "tonight" it's pudding.

Pete

[TempodiBasic]

I'm very fascinated to see all you here to remember the all good days of punch cards..

now I can do some questions, for the time when I wasn't yet born, but  a time very interesting:

1. but had also first BASIC used punch cards?

2. what did you use to make the punch cards? Pencils? Spike? or a mechanical type machine for making  holes?

3. what was the name of editor for those punch cards?

4. how  big had  to be a punch card of a single application?

5. how did you debug those punch cards?
...
what had  brought  you from a professional language like COBOL or FORTRAN to a toy language for only beginners (Beginners' All purpose  Simbolic Instruction Code)?
And what do let you continue to use BASIC at the place of a professional language of programming?

Hoping to get info of a fascinated past...
thanks for time spent for answering

[mnrvovrfc]

Probably too young for punch-cards also, but I also don't care how it was. I started in school with Apple IIe, not very much I was allowed to do and actually did. (In a bit I'm going to share an "emulation" of a game that I liked playing way back then on that computer.) Then I received as gift a Radio Shack TRS-80 (later Tandy) Color Computer 2 without Extended BASIC. Later I bought a cassette recorder to save and load programs. "Extended Basic" model was more expensive but offered up to 256x192 in two colors, which looked like four in some games that took advantage of raster faults on the old glass rounded CRT monitors and televisions all over the place in the 1980's.

Got ahold of COBOL only in about three months of "community" college LOL. Loved those control-breaks, thought it was the PC keyboard combination. :/

[bplus]

Punch card machines: https://www.google.com/search?q=punch+ca...51&bih=627

Each card was a line of code. BASIC used terminals connected to main frame on time share basis, not punch cards, sort a like teletype machines..

To debug, throw out bad card or cards and type up new set. BTW if your drop the cards, you lose the order of the program.

[Pete]

Light punch card on fire, insert in computer, and wait a decade for something better.

Pete