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Project:Nanode/Tiny Basic: Difference between revisions
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→BASIC - WTF!
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==BASIC - WTF!== | ==BASIC - WTF!== | ||
As computers have got more powerful with more memory and processor resources, much of the early work done with simple basic has been forgotten - but for a whole generation of programmers - | As computers have got more powerful with more memory and processor resources, much of the early work done with simple basic has been forgotten - but for a whole generation of programmers - Basic was their first introduction to real computer programming. | ||
The simplest of programs can be entered from a serial terminal window - and can be executed immediately using the RUN command - for example: | The simplest of programs can be entered from a serial terminal window - and can be executed immediately using the RUN command - for example: | ||
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20 GOTO 10 | 20 GOTO 10 | ||
Most programmers aged 30 or over were introduced to programming with a similar first program - it is the "Hello World" of BASIC programming | Most programmers aged 30 or over were introduced to programming with a similar first program - it is the "Hello World" of BASIC programming. | ||
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_BASIC Tiny Basic] hails from 1976, when members of the Homebrew Computer Club of Menlo Park - in Northern California's Silicon Valley were looking around for a simple and compact interpreted language that would run on their homemade Altair 8800 machines - and did not want to pay the young entrepreneur William Gates $150 for his version of 8080 Basic. So a challenge went out to the members to write their own - and several did, the most notable was Tom Pittman. | 30 years ago - almost every home computer you could buy had some sort of Basic interpreter running in the background. | ||
==Origins of Tiny Basic== | |||
BASIC stands for Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code and was developed around 1963/64 at Dartmouth College. Over the next 10 years it was ported to most of the mini and mainframe computers. | |||
In 1975 a very snot-nosed Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed a version of Basic to run on the new [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800 Altair 8800 home computer] This was the birth of Micro Soft and set Bill Gates out on his entrepreneurial career. The genius however was Paul Allen, who simulated the whole program on a minicomputer - withoutever having touched an Intel 8080 microprocessor system - however the is a digression. | |||
Our version of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_BASIC Tiny Basic] hails from 1976, when members of the Homebrew Computer Club of Menlo Park - in Northern California's Silicon Valley were looking around for a simple and compact interpreted language that would run on their homemade Altair 8800 machines - and did not want to pay the young entrepreneur William Gates $150 for his version of 8080 Basic. So a challenge went out to the members to write their own - and several did, the most notable was Tom Pittman. | |||
http://www.ittybittycomputers.com/IttyBitty/TinyBasic/index.htm . | http://www.ittybittycomputers.com/IttyBitty/TinyBasic/index.htm . | ||
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The first task was to find a program which can be used like an operating system - in order to tie all the various hardware functions and libraries together. | The first task was to find a program which can be used like an operating system - in order to tie all the various hardware functions and libraries together. | ||
I recently was made aware of an assembly language version that compiled on an AVR (eg ATmega328) into under 4K - but modifying this code was going to be a little to intense for most people - so I was delighted to see that Mike Field had taken the generic C version and updated it so that it can run on an Arduino - or Nanode - without modification. Mike's working port of Tiny Basic - written in C, compiles into just under 7.8K on a standard Arduino. If you crank the baudrate up to 115200 - it is surprisingly quick at executing. | I recently was made aware of an assembly language version that compiled on an AVR (eg ATmega328) into under 4K - but modifying this code was going to be a little to intense for most people - so I was delighted to see that Mike Field had taken the generic C version and updated it so that it can run on an Arduino - or Nanode - without modification. Mike's working port of Tiny Basic - written in C, compiles into just under 7.8K on a standard Arduino. If you crank the baudrate up to 115200 - it is surprisingly quick at executing. | ||
