Tag Archives: BASIC

Computers

Black Annex is a promising PC indie game built with QBASIC

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What’s the most difficult thing you did in the last year?  Now stop. Before you answer, can it compare to creating a full-fledged indie game—slated to be approved on Steam—created entirely with QBASIC? Probably not.

QBASIC is a software interpreter for the BASIC programming language that showed up in 1991, and basic it is. Here’s a little video of a game created by IBM to show off the awesome power of QBASIC when it first launched:

You get the idea after about 45 seconds. Now, over 20 years later—but with the exact same programming tools—we have Black Annex. Check out this trailer with actual gameplay—and I can’t say it enough—using the same programming language that the above video was “showing off.”

Not only are the simple visuals awesome, but the gameplay actually looks complex and tough to master—not something you’d expect from a programming language with simple loops and statements.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

From: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2033318/black-annex-is-a-promising-pc-indie-game-built-with-qbasic.html#tk.rss_all

Computers

Black Annex is the best QBASIC game you've ever seen

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What’s the most difficult thing you did in the last year?  Now stop. Before you answer, can it compare to creating a full-fledged indie game—slated to be approved on Steam—created entirely with QBASIC? Probably not.

QBASIC is a software interpreter for the BASIC programming language that showed up in 1991, and basic it is. Here’s a little video of a game created by IBM to show off the awesome power of QBASIC when it first launched:

You get the idea after about 45 seconds. Now, over 20 years later—but with the exact same programming tools—we have Black Annex. Check out this trailer with actual gameplay—and I can’t say it enough—using the same programming language that the above video was “showing off.”

Not only are the simple visuals awesome, but the gameplay actually looks complex and tough to master—not something you’d expect from a programming language with simple loops and statements.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

From: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2033318/black-annex-is-the-best-qbasic-game-youve-ever-seen.html#tk.rss_all

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

Microsoft's Long, Strange Trip Through the Computer Age

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By Alex Planes, The Motley Fool

Filed under:

On this day in economic and business history…

At the tail end of 1974, close friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen first learned about the Altair 8800 microcomputer, built by MITS out in New Mexico. The young programmers saw an opportunity to make that bare-bones hobby kit useful by creating a BASIC interpreter for its users, which would allow Altair owners to use the popular programming language on their new toy right out of the box (or close to it). The pair traveled to New Mexico — Gates abandoned his degree progress at Harvard for the opportunity — to work alongside the Altair’s creators. To capitalize on their new business, Gates and Allen formed Microsoft in Albuquerque on April 4, 1975.

Paul Allen would later recount the race to complete BASIC and gain the business it would create in Idea Man, an autobiography excerpted in Vanity Fair in 2011:

Some have suggested that our Altair BASIC was remarkable because we created it without ever seeing an Altair or even a sample Intel 8080, the microprocessor it would run on. What we did was unprecedented, but what is less well understood is that we had no choice. The Altair was little more than a bare-bones box with a CPU-on-a-chip inside. It had no hard drive, no floppy disk, no place to edit or store programs. …

By late February, eight weeks after our first contact with MITS, the interpreter (which would save space by executing one snippet of code at a time) was done. Shoehorned into about 3,200 bytes, roughly 2,000 lines of code, it was one tight little BASIC — stripped down, for sure, but robust for its size. No one could have beaten the functionality and speed crammed into that tiny footprint of memory: “The best piece of work we ever did,” as Bill told me recently. And it was a true collaboration. I’d estimate that 45 percent of the code was Bill’s, 30 percent Monte’s, and 25 percent mine, excluding my development tools.

In Microsoft’s first year of operation, its primary business model involved selling something like this…

Source: Wikipedia.

…to be fed into this:


Source: Wikipedia.

That’s right — the first Microsoft software came on a roll of paper tape and made a bunch of red lights blink on and off. For the first few months of its existence, it wasn’t even Microsoft yet, but “Micro-Soft,” hyphenated to better highlight the fact that it was software for microcomputers. Once MITS accepted Gates and Allen’s BASIC, the new company quickly secured its first license from NCR. However, revenue was pretty minuscule in Microsoft’s first year, and the three-man operation (Ric Weiland had joined the company after its formation in Albuquerque) banked only about $16,000.

Over the next few years, Microsoft would port BASIC to other popular machines as they entered the market, …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Linux

Bash INKEY$ function…

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By wisecracker

This is probably common knowledge to the professionals but not so much for amateurs like
myself.

This is a code snippet for the equivalent of BASIC‘s…

LET char$=INKEY$

As the timeout parameter cannot be less than 1 second then this is the only limitation…

It is a single line function which has a variable “char”…

Read the code for more information…

Issued as Public Domain…

Code:
#!/bin/bash

# An INKEY$ function for bash!
inkey() { char="" ; read -p "" -n1 -s -t1 char ; }
# Similar to BASIC's LET char$=INKEY$

# Do you remember INKEY$ in BASIC programming?
# Example:-
#
# PRINT "Some prompt:- "
# some_label:
# LET char$=INKEY$
# IF char$="" THEN
# IF char$="" THEN
# GOTO some_label

# This is just a test piece only...
while true
do
printf "Some prompt:- "
# This is LET char$=INKEY$...
inkey
printf "Key pressed:- '$char'...n"
if [ "$char" == "q" ]
then
printf "Quitting... n"
break
fi
if [ "$char" == "" ]
then
printf "Timeout works OK...n"
fi
if [ "$char" == "b" ]
then
printf "Barry Walker...n"
fi
done

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at The UNIX and Linux Forums

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

Is Microsoft One of the Best Companies in America?

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By Tim Beyers, The Motley Fool

Filed under:

The Motley Fool recently released its list of The 25 Best Companies in America, naming the best businesses the nation has to offer. Yet even among companies that didn’t make the final cut, some stocks distinguished themselves with their high quality and promise. Microsoft is one of those companies, and it definitely deserves at least an honorable mention for its achievements.

The case for Microsoft
Hacking has multiple meanings in the tech world. Most famously, it means to break into a secure system. But for Bill Gates and Paul Allen, hacking was just what they did. The pair, friends since childhood, were looking for a way to cash in on their programming skills when, in 1975, they pitched Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, or MITS, on a tool for helping its new Altair computer interpret commands written in the BASIC programming language.

The resulting deal introduced the world to Altair BASIC. Microsoft would later develop Windows and grow to dominate the market for personal computer operating systems so completely that, in 1998, the Justice Department sued to stop the company from what they asserted were abuses of monopoly power. The business hasn’t been the same since, which turns out to be good news for most of Microsoft’s stakeholders. Indeed, Mr. Softy garners an honorable mention for its commitment to investors, employees, and the world at large.

Employees
While Microsoft has lost its share of high-profile executives in recent years — former chief software architect Ray Ozzie, product marketing veteran Don Dodge, and one-time Windows chief Steven Sinofsky, to name three — workers tend to give the company high marks as a place to work. More than 77% would recommend Microsoft to a friend, according to Glassdoor.

But that’s also half the story. Workers are far less enthused by CEO Steve Ballmer. Only 48% approved of his performance as of this writing. “If there was a good performance measurement system then a forced stack ranking wouldn’t be necessary. Poor performers would be fired and good performers wouldn’t be forced out of their jobs,” wrote one employee identified as a “curriculum manager.” Another’s advice was simply to “fire” current CEO Steve Ballmer. Investors tend to agree.

And yet with so many executives gone, there appears little chance Microsoft will seek to replace Ballmer. Nevertheless, it’s troubling to see otherwise satisfied employees join a growing chorus of detractors.

Customers
Seeing once-hobbled competitors rise from the ashes can’t be helping improve Ballmer’s image. He famously derided Apple‘s iPhone, only to see it become one of the world’s most popular handheld devices. Google‘s Chrome browser has unseated Internet Explorer as top dog in certain regions.

Smartphones are more important than browsers to Microsoft’s fortunes — for now at least — which is why the company has teamed with Nokia for creating a compelling iPhone alternative. Trouble is, Samsung already has that position locked up thanks to the success of its Galaxy S series. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Linux

Matthew Helmke: Python for Kids

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I previously reviewed a book intended to teach programming to kids, Super Scratch Programming Adventure. That book used a self-contained editor and language that was easy to understand, easy to use, but confined its usefulness to a very limited set of roles. This is because of how Scratch is run and written.

It is no secret that I like Python. Even though I really don’t write code anymore, at least not very often, for most purposes I am still a big fan of Python over any other programming language I have learned. I’ve reviewed two Python books in the past, Learning Python and Python for Unix and Linux System Administration. While I know people who use Python as a beginner’s language for kids, I had not done any reading nor read any curriculum used for teaching programming to kids using Python that I felt I could recommend freely. Until now.

Python for Kids: A Playful Introduction to Programming is by Jason R. Briggs. It is the book that fills the hole in my Python library. It starts with a nice introduction and installation instructions for Windows 7, Mac OS X, and most importantly to me, Ubuntu (on which you are really only checking to make sure you have Python 3 installed, since Python is installed by default, although Ubuntu releases older than 12.04 may still have Python 2.x installed as default). Perhaps it is because we started in a similar era, but I found Briggs very easy to read and follow; like me, he started out by learning BASIC on a TRS-80. More likely, the clarity and tone are the result of an intentional focus so that kids can comprehend the complexities of the material. In either case, he did a wonderful job.

The book is broken down into logical chapters, each building upon the previous ones. It starts with foundational concepts like variables and calculations, adds types like strings and lists and tuples, then begins with an introduction to graphic interaction using the turtle module. This is much sooner than typical, and I think it is beneficial because it gives kids a quicker jump to that fun moment of power, “Hey! I just made that thing move on the screen.”

Then the book builds understanding with explanations of if and else statements and loops. On top of that are added the concepts of functions, modules, classes, and objects. We are now a mere third of the way through the book.

From here on, the simple explanations given will be expanded upon in easily-absorbed chunks. Built-in Python functions and useful modules each get a chapter. Then, we revisit turtle graphics to play some more. Once the basic graphic concepts are taught with turtle, tkinter is presented.

The last third of the book is focused on games. Specifically, using some fun game examples to flesh out the concepts more completely, developing greater fluency with the concepts, grammar, and vocabulary already presented.

One weakness of many beginning programming books is that once you finish the book you have to do further research on your own to figure out what to do next. I love that Python for Kids does not end this way, but instead includes a useful Appendix titled Where to Go from Here. This Appendix is short, but gives enough information to help the reader learn just a little bit about some Python resources and other programming languages to make those next steps just a little bit easier.

This book is suitable for kids in upper elementary school and older. The only real prerequisites are the ability to read and understand the concepts and a computer that will run Python. While the book is clearly written using suitably simple vocabulary, it is not watered down and never talks down to the reader. For this reason, despite the title, this book could be just as useful for the adult programming novice, too.

Disclosure: I was given my copy of this book by the publisher as a review copy.

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu