Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Happy New Year 2010 & My QBASIC Story

Happy New Year 2010 (that is Twenty-Ten :-)

I hope this year is full of joy, fun in your live. I'm having a full year with alot of work and my Java Certification exam in June 2010.

I reguarly visit reddit to see what is new in the programming world... I notice that there is a QBASIC interpreter written in JavaScript available online. By default it runs the Nibbles game (an old classic snake game).

QBasic was the first programming language that I used at the age of 14.. (I'm 28 now) when I was young, inexperience and programming was fun (yes it currently is still fun!) - writing my own dictionary, book library, help me with homework (especially maths) that is where my love for programming started that later became my career (another story how that started).

My dad bought me a old 386 SX, 40 MHz, 2MB RAM, 1.2 GB hard drive that ran MS DOS 6.22 with MS Windows 3.1. I learnt BASIC since it was the only books avialable in the schools library, taught you the old GW-BASIC in a cartoon style... GW-BASIC had line numbers etc where with QBasic it was the first version that didn't hand line numbers, had a proper IDE (no syntax highlighting or code completion yet), proper debugging in the form of breakpoints etc. In the language there was GOTO and GOSUB but mostly for back-ward compatibility with GW-BASIC where you get proper SUBs and FUNCTIONs in QBasic.

Later on I moved over to Library Basic so that I can compile my applications and not give my source away (yes even at that age I was very protective of my source code!)

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