<story><title>QuickBASIC Lives on with QB64</title><url>https://hackaday.com/2018/02/22/quickbasic-lives-on-with-qb64/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rlopezcc</author><text>QBasic was my first programming experience.&lt;p&gt;Back in 2008 I bought a computer for 50 uruguayan pesos (around 2 dollars), Pentium MMX and 32MB of ram. It didn&amp;#x27;t boot W98 because the hard drive was corrupted.&lt;p&gt;It did load MsDOS and I found Qbasic using the help command.&lt;p&gt;I didn&amp;#x27;t have internet so I used to go to the internet cafe with a floppy disk and download tons of tutorials in plain text to read with EDIT.EXE&lt;p&gt;Now I&amp;#x27;ve been working as a software developer for almost five years and love it, all thanks to QBasic and that old cheap computer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ashleyn</author><text>Qbasic is something that simply has no modern-day parallel.&lt;p&gt;It started very simple, PRINT and GOTO were enough to get you started. It had the tools to expand along as you learned, and a great community of amateurs who would make cool games with it. Eventually, you&amp;#x27;d grow out of it and try your hand at C, because by that point you were encouraged to learn so much (and with a gentle curve) that you exhausted its capabilities. It was an &lt;i&gt;excellent&lt;/i&gt; educational tool, an excellent way to get kids &amp;quot;hooked&amp;quot; into &amp;quot;real programming&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Learning programming today isn&amp;#x27;t quite as simple as it was with Qbasic. It involves setting up a large toolchain, and for a beginner, the experience is daunting as the language community reviled both anything imperative and unstructured. There&amp;#x27;s no easy way to do anything other than text from the command line, which makes for some thoroughly uninteresting demos and examples. Qbasic wrapped an IDE and graphics library around the language in an all-in-one solution; it was so cool seeing colourful, pseudo-graphical demos like Nibbles or Gorillas. If a beginner wanted to do anything &amp;quot;cool-looking&amp;quot; today, this same beginner programmer would need to set up render to texture on an OpenGL surface. Yuck! And so they lose interest, believing programming is the mysterious and complex domain of gods.&lt;p&gt;This market did not go away. I don&amp;#x27;t quite think QB64 fills it, being little more than a nostalgic, artistic homage to Qbasic. If someone were to design a programming language with a learning curve as gentle as Qbasic, and wrap a simple IDE and graphics library around it, all while modernising some of its more dubious qualities...you&amp;#x27;d have a real shot at recapturing the magic for a new generation of young programmers.</text></comment>
<story><title>QuickBASIC Lives on with QB64</title><url>https://hackaday.com/2018/02/22/quickbasic-lives-on-with-qb64/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rlopezcc</author><text>QBasic was my first programming experience.&lt;p&gt;Back in 2008 I bought a computer for 50 uruguayan pesos (around 2 dollars), Pentium MMX and 32MB of ram. It didn&amp;#x27;t boot W98 because the hard drive was corrupted.&lt;p&gt;It did load MsDOS and I found Qbasic using the help command.&lt;p&gt;I didn&amp;#x27;t have internet so I used to go to the internet cafe with a floppy disk and download tons of tutorials in plain text to read with EDIT.EXE&lt;p&gt;Now I&amp;#x27;ve been working as a software developer for almost five years and love it, all thanks to QBasic and that old cheap computer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andrewcarter</author><text>Me too! I love QBasic so much - totally wouldn&amp;#x27;t be where I am today without it. I met a kid at summer camp when I was in middle school who told me he made his own games and fake computer viruses to scare his parents in Quick Basic. He mailed me a floppy disk with Quick Basic on it once we were home and I&amp;#x27;ve been in love with programming ever since.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s was the perfect first language. It&amp;#x27;s so easy to play little sounds or draw graphics, and the environment is basically non-existent so setup is easy. So much fun!</text></comment>