Testimonies of using BASIC back in the day

[CameronB]

My first language in college was FORTRAN using punch card decks in batch mode. Junior year (1972) I passed a room full of teletypes in the ME building. They were open for use, no login or account required. It turned out to be a BASIC time sharing system running on a PDP-8. After that I spent a lot of time there including some skipped economics classes. The only way to save and reload programs was the paper tape punch/reader on the teletypes. One of the programs (not written by me) would punch text onto paper tape. I had tried something similar with asterisk graphics in FORTRAN but the system operators didn't give me the printout and wrote NO! on my deck. That's one reason I appreciated the Basic system, the other being it was interactive and not batch mode.

In 1977 I worked on an automated test system for a guided missile. It used a lot of HP test equipment connected by HPIB to an HP minicomputer. The test code was Basic. I represented the missile electronics not the test system but I did have to read the code for individual test steps.

After that I used Basic on various microcomputers at home and a tiny bit at work. Most of my professional coding was in assembly language and C.

[CP/M User]

I grew up using Locomotive BASIC 1.0 on an Amstrad CPC464, though now days I have an Amstrad CPC6128 with Locomotive BASIC 1.1 though I regularly code in LB1.0 to have it running on all the CPC systems.

For me personally originally it was about going to the Newsagents, purchasing some Magazines each month and type-in the programmes, I tried creating my own odd programme back then, though there were gaps and would based some of the code from other people's work, I particularly know that I didn't have much understanding on Array's, which looked more like a Mathematical problem.

These days I look at it a bit differently, for example I might look at some game coded in BASIC and think how would it look if it were like this or this and improve the coding of it. A couple of years ago I had some old 10-Liner riddled with issues, which I dissected with notes running through what it did. Some of the underlining issues were still present until I started focusing on having a Main Loop with some Structured programming put into play. By the end I had something which hardly looked like a 10-Liner, but was able to expose where there were flaws in the original code and fix them which is where I get a great deal of satisfaction.

But I have to be somewhat thankful that Pascal exists, by setting rules up for Structured Programming has helped me improve in BASIC, though BASIC seems to have tricks of it's own. BASIC can have a structured look to it which makes for easy reading, though with some clever coding skills it almost seems there's a whole other level in LB which I haven't progressed to and reading the source code to that seems like reading gibberish.

It's difficult to say where I draw the Line with GOTO because if misused, the programme becomes hard to read, this Dragon Curve example on Rosetta Code for the ZX Spectrum presents an unusually complex Loop to determine the Path of the Line. Eventually I had something up and running in Pascal, though for that BASIC example, it had a clever way of freeing up memory which I couldn't produce in Pascal unless, I could exit the Procedure, which I did by forcing an end of a Loop and then call the whole routine again with another Colour.

[nikola-wan]

Tangentially related, some months ago I started a benchmarking project for 8-bit home micro BASIC systems, calculating prime numbers by trial division (the goal was not to have an efficient way of finding prime numbers, but to have some consistent unit of work that could be expressed simply and therefore be implementable regardless of limitations in any particular system's BASIC).

At some point I thought I'd try my hand at an APL version to compare the speeds of BASIC and APL in my IBM 5100, and the project started spiraling out of control from there.

ZBasic, Dartmouth True BASIC (on the Macintosh), various Microsoft BASICs, even Atari 2600 BASIC are all represented (that last one was a challenging port).

It's pretty clear to see that Microsoft BASICs were all pretty slow, that Woz's Integer BASIC is pretty tidy, and Acorn's BBC BASIC is a masterwork.

I still have a few more language ports up my sleeves in various unfinished stages, a structural mistake in the DRI Personal BASIC version (which has also snuck into a couple other ports) that causes it to do more work after finding the last prime, which I need to correct both in the source and the published results, and a long list of results to gather using software and hardware I've already collected with ports I've already written.

Mostly the micro results are in the bottom half.

http://www.typewritten.org/Articles/...ks/primes.html

bear,

Thanks for your benchmark.

I ported the Commodore 64 program to my early 1980's Tektronix 4054A computer and got 21.27 seconds for n=100 last night:

Benchmark PRIMES
Start: 04-JAN-20 09:47:03.97 PM
End:             09:47:27.11 PM
Benchmark PRIMES (secs)= 21.27
END

The Tektronix 4052A and 4054A computers were the last generation of a series started in 1975 with the 4051 using a 6800 CPU running at 833KHz. http://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/4051
These computers were designed for scientific and engineering markets with remarkable graphics resolution of 1024x780 on the 4051 in 1975 based on Tektronix storage tube technology using vectors.
The 4051 entry price was $5995 with 32KB of BASIC ROM and 8KB of DRAM. Memory could be upgraded to a max of 32KB of DRAM.

The 4052 and 4054 were introduced in the late '70's to support demand for higher performance, and were a custom AMD 2901 bit-slice design with a 16-bit data bus, 128KB of total memory, with over 64KB of BASIC ROM and up to 64KB of DRAM. This architecture also provided 6800 8-bit instructions with new opcodes including micro-coded floating point instructions.

These hardware floating point instructions showed great performance (for the '80s) in the prime results above.

The 4052 and 4054 bit-slice microcoded CPU clock rate was 25MHz.

The 4052 had the same 12" Tektronix flat storage CRT and resolution as the 4051.
The 4054 and 4054A had a Tektronix 19" storage tube like the Tektronix 4114 terminal with 4096x3072 resolution! Still state of the art today

The 4052A and 4054A were introduced in the early 1980's, and the series was discontinued in the late 1980's.
The A-series added structured BASIC commands and other firmware enhancements including an assembly language CALL "EXEC", along with an assembler and documentation for the microcode instruction set and BASIC ROM entry points.

Here is my port of your prime program in Tektronix 4050 BASIC.
I have a Transera Real Time Clock ROMPACK plugged into the 4054A that provided the timing in HH,MM,SS,and hundredths of a second in a single CALL "!TIME" with numeric output parameters.

Tek BASIC arrays do not support a ZERO index, so I adjusted the program accordingly.
Also I created this one after typing in the nine BM benchmarks, which I will show results in a separate post. I changed the A variable to X in your prime program.
The output for the benchmark timing used separate 4800 baud serial printout to a laptop computer.

The serial port is accessed with the PRINT @40: statements. These Tektronix computers had optional serial interfaces and embedded GPIB interfaces. The @#: syntax allowed PRINT, READ, WRITE and byte commands to be addressed to any GPIB device or serial device.

I printed each computed prime to the screen during the benchmark - to match the other computers.

The formatted start/end printing and serial printing is outside the benchmark time measurement, which is why the total start/end time is slightly longer than the run.

1 GOSUB 900
2 CALL "!TIME",A0,B0,C0,D0
3 GO TO 10
5 X=X+1
6 GO TO 50
10 DIM P(100)
15 P=0
20 P(1)=2
25 PRINT P(1)
30 X=3
40 FOR F=2 TO 100
50 FOR I=1 TO F-1
60 V=X/P(I)
65 IF V=INT(V) THEN 5
70 NEXT I
80 PRINT X;
90 P(F)=X
100 X=X+1
110 NEXT F
120 CALL "!TIME",A1,B1,C1,D1
130 GO TO 1010
900 REM    PRIMES
910 C$="PRIMES"
920 CALL "!DATETIME",A$
930 PRINT "Benchmark ";C$;"Start: ";A$
940 PRINT @40:"Benchmark ";C$
950 PRINT @40:"Start: ";A$
960 RETURN 
1010 CALL "!TIME",B$
1020 PRINT "End:             ";B$
1030 PRINT @40:"End:             ";B$
1040 S0=A0*3600+B0*60+C0+D0/100
1050 S1=A1*3600+B1*60+C1+D1/100
1060 S=S1-S0
1070 PRINT "Benchmark ";C$;"(secs)= ";S
1080 PRINT @40:"Benchmark ";C$;" (secs)= ";S
1090 PRINT "END"
1100 PRINT @40:"END"
1110 END 
1120 RETURN

[nikola-wan]

I forgot to mention, Tektronix 4050 BASIC had no integer variables, all numeric variables were 14 digit floating point +/-8.998E+/-307 (8 bytes plus variable name overhead).

The 4054A/4054A ALU board used a multiplexed 16-bit address/data bus and extended the 6800 limited register space to sixteen 16-bit registers, which could hold two floating point numbers to speed up the floating point.

The 'A' and 'B' registers were also extended to take advantage of 16-bit addressing and data operations.

Here is a 4052/4054 ALU block diagram from the Tekscope 1979 Vol 11 No 3 magazine:

4054 micro architecture - Tekscope 1979 V11N3.jpg

[nikola-wan]

Tektronix 4051 computer was my first 'personal' computer in my first job after college in the mid 1970's.

I loved the instant access of Tektronix 4050 BASIC a couple of seconds after powering on the computer, and I wrote dozens of programs - for work and for play in the late 1970's, and had the foresight to keep hard copies of all my programs.

I also made extensive use of the 4050 BASIC graphics, plus the I/O addressing capability, which provided access not only to the internal DC300 tape storage, but also the GPIB access to the 4907 external floppy drive system and a large rear-projected digitizing tablet.

I had no formal software training in college - and 4050 BASIC was very easy to use, and included several capabilities for debugging, like a SET TRACE command, which prints executed line numbers while running the program. In addition, 4050 BASIC allows quick access to value of any variable by just typing the variable name, and provides calculator capability on the command line.

I later worked at Compaq Computer in the mid-1980's on the Deskpro 286/386/486 hardware design team - and lamented that Microsoft BASIC did not have many of the capabilities in 4050 BASIC, so I couldn't port many of my 4050 programs.
Same goes for the early PC CGA graphics. Even VGA graphics 640x480 was about 1/4 of the resolution of the Tektronix 4051 more than ten years prior.

[Chuck(G)]

I forgot to mention, Tektronix 4050 BASIC had no integer variables, all numeric variables were 14 digit floating point +/-8.998E+/-307 (8 bytes plus variable name overhead).

That's not unsual--original BASIC didn't have typed variables. When we did our version, we left out numeric typing as well.

We did keep string variables and allowed implied conversion between string and numeric; i.e. A$=B$+3 We stored floating point variables in "compressed" as literals. Saved quite a bit of space.

[krebizfan]

Same goes for the early PC CGA graphics. Even VGA graphics 640x480 was about 1/4 of the resolution of the Tektronix 4051 more than ten years prior.

There were third party card and monitor combinations capable of 1024 x 768 or better resolutions in the mid-80s. The Vermont Microsystems doing 1024 x 800 with 256 colors cost about $6,000.

[nikola-wan]

"BASIC, FORTRAN, S-ALGOL, and PASCAL Benchmarks on microcomputers including the effects of floating point processor support" was published by Marcus Wigan in August of 1982 as mentioned earlier in this thread in a post by krebizfan:

Testimonies-of-using-BASIC-back-in-the-day post #39

Table 7 starting on page 14 showed results from running INTERFACE AGE benchmark BM9 using BASIC or BASIC compilers on a variety of microcomputers, and minicomputers.

I ran this benchmark on my Tektronix 4054A last night and got 310 seconds which put it in 12th place as my retyped table below shows.

System	CPU	MHz	O/S	Language	RUN Time
CDC CYBER	171	.	NOS 1.4	BASIC	5
IBM	3033	.	VS2-10RVYL	Stanford BASIC	10
PRIME	300	.	PRIMOS	BASIC	25
Seattle System 2	8086	8	MS-DOS	MsB(compiled)	33
DEC	PDP11/70	.	kSTS/E	BASIC	45
PRIME	Jul-01	.	PRIMOS	BASIC V16.4	63
DEC	PDP10	.	TOPS-10	BASIC	65
IBM	S/34	.	R-05	BASIC	129
Digital Microsystems	HEX-29	6	HOST	HBASIC_	143
HP	3000	.	.	BASIC	250
4MHz Z80A	Z80	4	CP/M 2.2	MsB(compiled)5.03	277
Tektronix 4054A	AMD2901	25	.	4050A ROM BASIC	310
terak 8510a LSI-11	CP1600	.	UCSD 1.5	BASIC 1.5 Compiler	310
Seattle System 2	8086	8	MS-DOS	BASIC	310
Alpha Micro AM100T	WWD16	3	AMOS 4.3A	AlphaBASIC	317
Apple II+	6502	2	DOS 3.3	Microsoft TASC	325
DEC	PDP11/45	.	.	BASIC	330
Apple II+	6502	2	DOS 3.3	Expediter II compiler	335
Data General	NOVA3	.	Timeshare	BASIC 5.32	517
BBC Micro	6502	.	BBC BASIC	BBC Integer Basic	523
SWTPC	6800	.	Software Dyn	Compiler B 1.2	528
Alpha Micro AM100	WD16	2	AMOS 4.3A	AlphaBASIC	573
Technico SS-16	9900	3	DOS	SuperBASIC3	585
terak 8510a LSI-11	CP1600	.	RT11 V0.3	8k BASIC	596
BBC Micro	6502	2	BBC BASIC	BBC F/POINT BASIC	596
Ohio C4-P	6502	2	OS65D 3.2	Level I BASIC	680
North Star FP	Z80	4	MS-DOS	MS BASIC	685
terak 8510a LSI-11	CP1600	.	RT11 V0.3	MUBASIC	703
Apple II+	6502	2	DOS	Integer BASIC	722
ADDS Multivision	8085	5	NUON	MBASIC 5.2	877
4MHz Z80A	Z80	4	CP/M 2.2	MBASIC 4.5.1	966
Apple II+	6502	2	DOS 3.3	APPLESOFT II	970
Rexon RX30	8086	5	RECAP	Business BASIC	1020
Cromemco	Z80	4	CDOS	Extended BASIC	1196
North Star	Z80	4	NS-DOS	NS BASIC	1149
Processor Tech Sol-20	.	.	Solos	Altair BASIC 8k	1231
Exidy Sorcerer	Z80	4	.	Microsoft BASIC	1260
ISC Compucolor CC-II	8080	.	.	BASIC	1267
Apple II+	6502	2	CP/M 2	GBASIC	1284
Ohio C3-C	6502	1	OS65D	Level I BASIC	1346
Commodore PET 2001	6502	.	.	Microsoft BASIC	1374
ISC Compucolor 8051	8080	.	DOS	BASIC 8001	1375
Hewlett-Packard HP85	NMOS	.	.	BASIC	1380
Basic/Four 600	8080	.	.	BASIC	1404
Micro V Microstar 1	8085	3	StarDOS	StarDOS BASIC	1438
Sinclair	Z80	2.5	.	4k BASIC	1514
Processor Tech Sol-20	.	.	Solos	PT Extended BASIC	1812
Heath H89	Z80	.	.	Microsoft 4.7 BASIC	1850
Zilog MCZ-1/70	Z80	2	RIO	Zilog BASIC	1863
Tandy TRS Model 1	Z80	2	TRSDOS	Level II BASIC	1929
IBM 5120	.	.	.	BASIC	1956
4MHz Z80	Z80	4	CP/M 2.2	CB80 v1.3	1988
4MHz Z80	Z80	4	CP/M 2.2	BASIC-E(M9511 4M)	2208
Vector MZ	Z80	.	MDOS	Micropolis 8.5 BASIC	2261
Digicomp P100-Z80	Z80	3	CP/M 2.2	BASIC-E(M9511 4M)	2322
Cromemco CS3	Z80	4	CDOS	CBASIC-2	2245
Texas Instruments99/4	9900	.	.	TI BASIC	2479
Ortex Microengine	CP1600	2	UCSD.H1	BASIC 1.1	3017
4MHz Z80A	Z80	4	CP/M 2.2	CBASIC v2.06	3100
Zenith H89	Z80	.	.	Benton Harbor BASIC	3550
Pocket TRS-80	2x4CMOS	.	.	BASIC	55830

[Chuck(G)]

Even VGA graphics 640x480 was about 1/4 of the resolution of the Tektronix 4051 more than ten years prior.

Apples and oranges. The Tek used a storage tube display and was monochrome only. I've never seen a Tek storage tube display in larger sizes (e.g. 20-24"); they might have existed. If you want early, consider the Digigraph 270, circa 1964. 22" CRT with a 1000x1000 resolution. To be fair, this was a vector-mode display.

[Dwight Elvey]

The Nicolet 1080 BASIC used 20 bit integer but one could load the floating point package, that I have but never tried. It also does a number of matrix operations. I can't run the BASIC on it right now as I'm not able to access the disk now. I hope to trouble shoot it in the month or so. I believe it runs an instruction in 1 or two usec, depending on the instruction. It has hardware assist for multiply and divide.
Dwight