For the last few months I've been looking back at old computer magazines from the 70's and early 80's, and it surprised me how much heavy lifting was done in BASIC.
Today, BASIC is looked upon as a children's language. But back then, it was widely used for serious work. I can think of a few reasons why:
- It was available on pretty much every platform
- It was usually built-in to the computer, so there was no extra cost
- If the program you wanted wasn't directly cross-platform, the syntax was close enough that you could figure out the differences and adjust it to work on your machine
- Most consumer and small business computers didn't have the horsepower to compile FORTRAN or Pascal or COBOL.
There are probably others, but from what I've been reading in the old mags, those seem to be the big selling points.
Today, BASIC is looked upon as a children's language. But back then, it was widely used for serious work. I can think of a few reasons why:
- It was available on pretty much every platform
- It was usually built-in to the computer, so there was no extra cost
- If the program you wanted wasn't directly cross-platform, the syntax was close enough that you could figure out the differences and adjust it to work on your machine
- Most consumer and small business computers didn't have the horsepower to compile FORTRAN or Pascal or COBOL.
There are probably others, but from what I've been reading in the old mags, those seem to be the big selling points.