BASIC turns 60 today

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/24/05/01/1751243/the-basic-programming-language-turns-60

My first job threatened to teach me CORAL 66, in 1987; I was ready to quit over it.

My very first programming language in 1978, using a Commodore PET.

You youngsters you!

I started at Uni in 1967, where my department (Nuclear Engineering) had a PDP8, which I learned to program in PDP8 assembly language. The computing centre had an ICL 1905e, on which I learned to program in FORTRAN, but we could only use the overnight batch service on that, which was pretty limiting.

Starting at Uni in 1973 I had already experienced BASIC in the Sixth Form in 1972 at the local FE college which used a timeshare terminal on Hatfield Poly. At Uni we were taught FORTRAN and BASIC using punched paper tape to feed in our programmes. There was only one calculator in the Engineering Dept and that was an HP35 chained to the desk. Two years on and most of us had calculators but we had to use a slide rule in the exams.

Yup – punched paper tape for the PDP8…once you’d loaded its 28-word start-up program on the binary switches on the front panel so it knew how to read the paper tape. Punched cards for the 1905e.

LOL. As an 11 year old in 1978 I might have had problems getting my hands on a PDP8. Learnt so much using the PET, then slowly began getting my hands on other machines, Compukit UK101, Nascom 1, all running Basic, and finally an Acorn Atom….. the rest is history. Think they are all in the loft somewhere.

Bah! All modern stuff. My first coding (in machine code) was done at Uni on a Stantec Zebra – a roomfull of glowing valves! Paper tape in, paper tape out. The room was nice and warm though.

Bah! All modern stuff.

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned toggling in the code byte by byte in binary using little flip switches.

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned toggling in the code byte by byte in binary using little flip switches.

That’s exactly what I did on a second level OU course back in 1979(?). “The Digital Computer” TM200 and something – can’t recall at this distance.

The computer was called HECTOR and that’s about all I can remember. Did anyone else hereabouts do the same course?

The computer was called HECTOR

There’s a Douglas Adams feel about that name. Something to do with the Krikkit wars?

Hector was the terminal we used at Manchester uni in 1975 or around that time, so long ago seems like another life ago.

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned toggling in the code byte by byte in binary using little flip switches.

I did mention it – but not byte by byte, 12-bit word by 12-bit word in binary on the PDP8. You only had to do 28 words though, that was enough to drive the paper tape reader in a very stupid fashion so it could read how to do it better. 1967.

You can’t call yourself a proper grey beard unless you’ve toggled in a boot loader before man set foot on the moon, eh Clive!

We’ve come a long way. Now you can buy your own supercomputer!

Yeah, but can it run BASIC?

Now you can buy your own supercomputer!

Depending on where you draw the line, your little Pi may outclass a supercomputer by an order of magnitude.

The Pi 4 offers 4.4 GFLOPS (the Pi 5 is over 10, but it doesn’t run RISC OS so we’ll skip it).

Cray 1? 160 MFLOPS. Cray X-MP? 800 MFLOPS. Cray Y-MP, around 2.2 GFLOPS.
To put it into comparison, the Pi 1 sucked massively (marginally better than the Cray 1). The Pi 2 has about twice as many MFLOPS as the X-MP, and all later models are better then the Y-MP.

It’s not until the Y-MP90 or the letter X1 that we’re seeing something that could match the more recent Pi models. The Y-MP90 had a little under 2GFLOPS per processor, but could have between 4 and 32 professors. The X1 is something like 10GF per processor. But this is a multi million dollar behemoth from about twenty four years ago. Post-Acorn, and nearly bested by a $50 hobbyist board.

[source – loads of googling and this]

So, yeah…

We’ve come a long way.

!

Some takeaways from the linked page, since this is Aldershot…

The Apple M1 lays claim to a mere 26W and offers an utterly ridiculous 154 GFLOPS. So if you have one of those, it’s clearly not the petaflops of modern supercomputers, but it’s mightier than most such things that are maybe just two decades old…and you use it for watching cat videos, right?

At the other end of the scale… Is Apple again. This time with a 65C02 based Apple II, which achieves a conical 1.33E-7 GFLOPS (if my maths is right, that’s about 133 FLOPS), and it takes about 20W to do so.

Speaking of utterly ridiculous, it’s quite easy to spot ARM vs non-ARM. Just look at the power consumption. ARM gets single digit amounts. Enter x86 which uses, like, ten times that.

could have between 4 and 32 professors.

I knew all that stuff about silicon was nonsense. Counting with sand – huh!
What we need is 64 professors.

A timely demonstration of the usefulness of “AI”. When it has to pick a word, it tends not to pick the word I wanted…

which achieves a conical 1.33E-7 GFLOPS

I like that concept, too.

conical 1.33E-7 GFLOPS

Very useful if you need to generate a circle, ellipse, parabola or hyperbola.

😋