Nostalgia

And you try telling the kids of today that…

That first version only had 14 commands. They included: PRINT, IF and THEN, and, the soon-to-be infamous GOTO. Thanks to GOTO, the famous Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra said, "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

With GOTO, it was all too easy for would-be programmers to write what would become known as spaghetti code -- a tangled mess of source code that was almost impossible to understand or debug. Yes, BASIC was easy to write simple programs in, but it was awful for writing anything complex.

Still, the keyword was "easy." So, early developers kept using BASIC and porting it to one computer after another. 

Then, as the years rolled by, another paradigm for computing power emerged: The PC. In 1975, instead of sharing computers, you could have one of your very own with all the power of a 2MHz Intel 8080 processor.

Two young men, Paul Allen, and Bill Gates, proposed to the maker of the first PC, Ed Roberts' Altair 8800, that they port BASIC to his computer. He agreed, and shortly thereafter, they founded Micro-Soft. You know it better as Microsoft.

Yes, that's right. Without BASIC, you're not running Windows today. At about the same time, Steve Wozniak was working on porting BASIC to the first Apple computer, the Apple I. BASIC was essential for Apple's early growth as well.

BASIC also became a staple in home computers like the Atari 400, Commodore 64, and TRS-80. It was featured prominently in early computer magazines, where readers could find and then type in BASIC code all by themselves. Or, you could pay real money and get a cassette tape with such popular games as Lunar Lander.

Then, when IBM came out with its first PC, Gates and Allen were ready to take advantage of this new platform. As IBM President of Entry Systems, Don Estridge, said, "Microsoft BASIC had hundreds of thousands of users around the world. How are you going to argue with that?"

Consider Republican governor and presidential hopeful Nikki Haley’s lament, posted on social media in June 2023, as she made a play for Trump supporters: “Do you remember when you were growing up…how simple life was, how easy it felt? It was about faith, family, and country.” The operative phrase here is “when you were growing up” — that is, when you were a child and therefore likely to be less aware of, or at least bothered by, disturbing news stories, complicated events, and hidden dangers. To claim that life itself is less simple and easy today is to confuse a life-cycle effect (what is true of people at a certain age) with a period effect (what is true of everyone at a certain point in history).