09-02-2025, 10:25 PM
(09-02-2025, 08:50 PM)dcoterel Wrote: I learned basic programming on an IBM 5100 at my uncles business, my family saw my interest and bought me a Pet for my 14th birthday (78), it instantly consumed all my spare time, I wrote a tank battle game in basic using peeks and pokes where both tanks could move at the same time and fire at the same time while maintaining movement with the tanks but it was extremely slow, I needed to make it faster so I picked up a book on the 6502 assembly language...
Your story sounds a lot like mine!
I started out on a TRS-80 Model 1 at school, learning the basics of BASIC. Then got my own computers - Texas Instruments TI99/4A, Commodore 64 (taught myself how to program with all the PEEKs and POKEs, and rudimentary 6502 assembly language). Eventually I wound up in Windows and spent years in different languages but always preferred BASIC. Microsoft had QuickBasic and VB6 which I used, but those got discontinued and .NET just kept changing and getting too damn complicated. All my programs kept becoming obsolete because they kept deprecating everything! Finally I found QB64 which is nice and simple, but still has all the cool structured programming features I first saw in Pascal. And for the most part it has stayed backwards-compatible in the 5 years since I started. Yay!