Qb64 V1.3 Download

[Ashlyn Robello]

Thefact that this sign has been installed by New Hampshire is due to the efforts of David Brooks, a journalist on the Concord Monitor who having noted that the existing 255 official highway historical markers maintained by the state of New Hampshire failed to celebrate its technical and scientific accomplishments. To rectify this he proposed a marker commemorating BASIC together with the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, an important precursor to the internet that allowed far-flung computers to share resources - however he was later persuaded that it would be too hard to cram both concepts into the limited word count of a sign.

Dartmouth College, a small university founded in 1769 specializing in the humanities, might seem a strange location to look for computer breakthroughs but there were precedents. It was there in 1940 that Dr Stiblitz of Bell Labs demonstrated the use of a computer over a telephone line in the days when computers hardly existed. Then in 1956 John McCarthy organized the Dartmouth Conference which coined the term "artificial intelligence" and initiated AI as a field of study. It was also in 1956 that two math professors, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz resolved to find a better way to teach the emerging discipline of computing to their students.

Having been born in Hungary, Kemeny emigrated to the USA with his parents in 1940 when he was 12. Clearly the effort of learning English wasn't enough to damage his other studies because he entered Princeton to study math, gained his doctorate at the age of 23 and became a full Professor at Dartmouth College aged 27. But rather than pure research his interests settled on teaching and in particular teaching computing.

Kurtz also received his PhD from Princeton in 1956 and he joined the Maths department at Dartmouth the same year. Having taken a pay cut to work at Dartmouth Kurtz asked Kemeny if there was any way of increasing his income. One suggestion was an IBM research fellowship at the MIT computing site and so he and Kemeny, together with John McCarthy worked together on one of the most primitive of computers - an IBM 704 located at MIT.

Kemeny and Kurtz both learned Share Assembly Language and very soon after realized that this was no way to teach computing! It was obvious that a new language was needed and they wasted no time in trying to invent one. Their first attempt, DARtmouth SIMplified COde (DARSIMCO) was just a system of templates, each one corresponding to a small number of assembly language commands, but fortunately 1957 saw the first appearance of FORTRAN, which provided a model of what a high-level language should be like and what it could achieve. Initially BASIC was going to be a subset of FORTRAN but Kemeny and Kurtz decided that no subset of any existing language would be complete enough.

In 1959 Dartmouth College acquired an LGP-30 machine with 4K 30-bit words provided by a magnetic drum and a 16-instruction set, but something better was obviously needed without the complexities and irritations of punched cards and batch processing systems. Can you imagine how long it takes to learn to program if it takes a week to get the results back? It was John McCarthy who suggested that Kemeny and Kurtz do time-sharing and in 1964 with the help of grants and discounts, a GE-255 computer was installed.

Even before this machine arrived Kemeny and a group of students were working on the compiler for a language suitable for learning to program - the Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, or BASIC and the first ever BASIC program ran within months of the machine's arrival - at 4 o'clock in the morning on May 1, 1964.

BASIC grew from parochial beginning to be the language that fuelled the microcomputer explosion of the 1980's. This was lageley due to Microsoft which produced versions for the Altair and for many of its successors.

While "street BASIC" was enthusiastically adopted by its users it attracted negative attention from the academic world with the first, and most remembered, broadside being delivered by a letter - "GOTO considered harmful" in an academic journal by Edsger Dijkstra, one of the pioneers of structured programming. Put bluntly this claimed that students who learned to program via BASIC were irrevocably brain damaged and could never reform their ways and learn a structured language.

Kemeny and Kurtz were affected by the attack on their language, which they knew was the best for teaching programming to the non-specialist. Their response was to create and market True BASIC - a fully structured compiled language that is still available as a commercial product with the most recent version being True Basic 6.

Perhaps the most influential version of BASIC, in terms of introducing programming to the masses, was QBasic. This was because Microsoft included it in its MS-DOS operating system. It too is still available - in an open source version. There is also a free to download version QB64 v1.3 the allows for older programs written in BASIC to run on today's hardware. According to its website, it also allows for modern software development as it extends the language to use advanced features available in operating systems nowadays as well as OpenGL, which is the library used for rendering across different platforms.

World Emoji Day 2024 Surveys Most Confusing Emojis19/07/2024This week sees the 'celebration', if that's the word we're looking for, of World Emoji Day, the annual emoji-fest that has happened on July 17 for the last eleven years. This year we've largely b [ ... ]

Learning to code in the 1980s was a magical time. We typed code listings from magazines into our Commodore, Sinclair, Amstrad, Apple computer and then prayed that they worked. Some of us, myself included, didn't know that we could save our projects to tape, and our work was lost as soon as we turned off the computer. What language were we using? Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) of which there were a few different versions for te home computers of the era. To load BASIC, all we needed to do was power on our computer and we were presented with a prompt that could load our games and be used to write our code.

Of course, writing BASIC in the 21st century may seem a little weird. We now have Python, Lua, Rust etc. But BASIC is a great way to introduce coding as it is extremely easy to read and provides a base from which the learner can learn other languages.

I never put my blog posts behind paywall or pop ups because quite frankly that is annoying and prevents anyone from accessing the content. I will always keep my blog content free of charge. But I do ask that if you are able and willing, that you buy me a "coffee" as it helps me to pay for hosting this blog, and to buy stuff to hack from Poundshops / Dollar Stores / Aliexpress which are used in free projects and reviews on this blog. It is You dear reader who make this possible, and I am immensely grateful for your support.

Thanks!

I can now write BASIC code in the interpreter and luckily for us there is a page full of documentation covering how to use PyBASIC.

But I did have a play and I wrote something to print nice messages on the screen.

When I moved from Commodore computers, my parents bought me a PC (486 DX 33 with 4MB RAM and a 120MB hard drive) and on that machine I played DOOM, Star Wars: X Wing and wrote some basic batch scripts. But I also learnt a little BASIC via QBasic which came bundled with MSDOS 6.22.

I recently wrote a feature for Linux Format, covering retro PC emulation and I went back to this era, showed off how to write BASIC on a virtual 486 and ran Windows 3.1 after a long hiatus.

The QB64 team contacted me and pointed out that there is a modern day version of QBasic, QB64.

I like QB64. It is easy to use, looks just like QBasic and I can make executable applications from it!

All we need to do is download the relevant package for our operating system, extract the contents and then run the qb64 application from the folder.

I adapted the code that I wrote for PyBASIC to QB64 syntax, merely editing lines 10 and 20. QB64 has syntax and error highlighting built in! marvelous!

Sure, I said that we can make an executable directly in QB64, well here we go! By selecting Run >> Make Executable Only we can create a file in the QB64 directory which runs directly from the terminal / desktop.

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