Programming experiences with BASIC

It was somewhere in the early 80s when the emergence of home computers like the Commodore-64, the Atari or the MSX also heralded the emergence of educational programs. As a new teacher that appealed to me, and when a Commodore-64 finally came to school, I sat in all afternoon breaks with that thing in front of me. Not only to play, but especially to see if I could make the thing do what I wanted. Because, of course, that's what it was about. The first frequent response of the thing was the message: syntax error. But that didn't make me beat me out of the field.

When I purchased a home computer myself shortly afterwards, I went for the MSX because the MSX-DOS operating system was to some extent compatible with MS-DOS, which was used for the emerging PCs. And I hit programming. The home conputers were standard equipped with a version of BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) that could be programmed.

The advantage of BASIC was the relative readability and ease with which you could jump from instruction to instruction. That was also the disadvantage. Basic programs work with line numbers. An example:

10 Print'Hello World'

20 Print'Welcome to Digital Time'

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