I remember changing values in gorillas.bas as a kid to make the bananas go faster or slower or changing the sky from blue to red. I thought I was a little hacker man for sure.
QBasic kinda fucked me later in life though when I had to basically unlearn all the shit programming techniques I picked up on it when learning C++.
The very first code pre-teen me wrote was in QuickBasic a thousand years ago.
Core memory unlocked.
Same here! ❤️
Unless you want to count .BAT files
Back before dependency hell set in
Ditto. I had the option of taking a comp sci class in grade 11/12 which taught QBasic back in 2001/2002. Still got all the basic bitch programs I made for the class on a hard drive somewhere lol.
I learnt to code in 1984 on my MSX which came with Microsoft MSX Basic.
We had the computer because my grandpa was into tech and bought new computers all the time. He gave my parents the computer and because my room was the only one with a bit of space, it came to sit on my desk. We had a couple of games for it on cartridge, but they were kinda lame.
One day by accident I stumbled upon the MSX Basic interface and didn’t know what I was looking at. I asked my dad and he didn’t really know anything about it, but remembered my grandpa also gave us a book with the computer. The book was about learning Basic and because computers were a new thing at the time, it was written in a way that made it easy to understand. I asked my dad what you could actually do with Basic, he didn’t know but it had something to do with telling the computer what it should do. So I said: “Could you create games with it?” He said: “Sure, I guess?”.
My little goblin mind freaked out, something that would allow new games! The games we had were lame so I really wanted new games. So I spent thousands of hours learning everything I could about that machine, Basic and coding in general. My grandpa gave me lots of books and I learned all the hardware and the assembly etc. I made a lot of games over the years, some good, most bad and made my siblings play them. We still remember some of them and joke about it. Especially because one of my brothers specialized in finding ways to cheat and exploit my games, which was tons of fun.
Later in life I studied to become an Embedded System Engineer because I really like the low-level programming side and the hardware aspect. Also the gaming industry sucks to work in, so I’ll pass on that. Maybe some day I’ll create another game as a passion project, but life gets in the way at the moment.
Great story!
Love reading all the nostalgia these historical tidbits inevitably bring up
This was the first language I learned.
I learned English later.
Ah memories! I wrote the project for my GCSE computer studies on this. I also wrote my friends project for 20 quid since our teacher was rubbish and hadn’t actually taught anyone to program. Most of the other kids figured it out, but my friend was clueless and didn’t want to completely fail the subject.
I met a dude on a bbs when I was 10 years old who gave me a pirated copy and taught me how to code in basic.
Holy shit if my kids did that I would lose my mind, I had no tech mentors so 10 year old me found one lol!
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Like yours though, it never went anywhere and was literally just a simple framework with nothing to run in it.
Why are you talking about the QBasic sprite-based RPG “engine” I wrote in 1999? I was very proud that you could move the selection box with the arrow keys.
Of course, I was also in college and not a tween, so maybe English was the right degree path for me after all.
My “completed” QB projects were (1) a text-based “RPG” set in the era of the historical Macbeth, with (IIRC) five scripted encounters, and (2) a single-player Star Wars “Sabacc” card game based on 90% of the rules listed in the old West End Games sourcebook. The “AI” was a set formula not unlike the newbie blackjack rules posted everywhere. I think. Maybe that was planned for v2 though. I was fairly proud of the graphics engine that imported text files and assigned colors to pixels based on which ASCII character you’d used.
These days, I don’t do anything more complex than editing keyboard configurations in KMK.
Like others in here, my first “hacking” was manipulating the included programs bundled with qbasic. One time I thought I’d be clever and make Nibbles add one life instead of subtract one when a collision was detected.
I quickly realized my mistake when a higher level became impossible and there was no way to quit (I don’t recall if ctrl-c worked for those programs).
This was my first non-OS Microsoft purchase.
The most fun thing I did with it was to write a “war dialer” inspired by the 1983 movie “War Games”.
It had a “graphical” screen where one could enter a telephone area code, an exchange, and starting and ending numbers, then it would command the modem to dial each number in sequence.
It would log the call results as “no answer”, “busy”, “voice”, or “data”.
Good memories…
This was, also, my first programming language ever. Oh the memories of typing it in from one of those books on the one computer we had in our classroom…
Oh man. Great memories here. I wrote some BBS software using this. I never got to actually run my BBS, though, since I was a kid and my dad didn’t want to pay for a second line.
I still have .BAS files floating around I wrote in QuickBASIC. I have no idea why.
Some where actually useful - like a program that read files (mainly meant for things like executables) and extracted plain text from it. Handy for finding text in files you couldn’t readily open in anything else.
Another renamed files with various switches like title case, or padding numbers with zeros. Was handy for renaming MP3 files for example. Actually they were probably S3M modules back then heh…
Ohhhh man mod files! I loved that shit.
A few months ago I was tasked with translating a script from one IBM emulator program to another because the owners of the first program wouldn’t respond to requests to purchase a new license.
The scripting language used on both was unique to the software, and the documentation was basically non-existent. Plus, the script was written over a decade ago, and the guy who wrote it was long gone.
For weeks I banged my head against the wall trying to figure out the logic flow before I realized that it was essentially BASIC, which I haven’t touched in over 20 years.
I started my programming career with Turbo Basic and Visual Basic 3. The one thing missing from these languages that makes me wonder how the hell I did anything at all is classes. I vaguely remember using arrays for all sorts of weird shit but that’s it.
I loved QuickBASIC. I’d write Assembly Language routines in Turbo Assembler and call them from QuickBASIC.
I wrote a DeskMate clone for fun and it was actually pretty decent; TASM gave it decent performance.
I tried writing an “operating system” in QBasic. Yes, I was that ignorant and optimistic at the same time. I still have the code. Standard VESA driver, high resolutions. Wrote my own terrible scripting language. But it was fun doing that. These days I rarely find any programming fun. It’s all tedious and dealing with middleware issues.
Good times, playing nibbles / gorillas with my siblings. I never got into programming as an adult, but I got quite into making stuff with QBasic as a kid. We used to make very annoying programs to take to school and unleash upon the poor beleagured IT department.
I wasn’t here for this, but my first exposure was when my uncle showed me BASICA on Windows 98. Then I started playing around with VB 6. The rest was history.
Now I am a full-time backend engineer mostly doing Python & Linux programming. Not sure where I’d end up otherwise.
