Radio 4: Codes that Changed the World
3. Basic
Clips from this programme
Introduction: BASIC for everyone's home computer, and learnt at school
Duration: 01:20
BASIC: Nasty, brutish and short, not part of the mainstream (Dartmouth College, USA): 1980s machines all had BASIC and taught in schools with the BBC Micro (Gordon Henderson) (Eben Upton)
Duration: 03:09
BBC Micro (with BBC BASIC) vs Sinclair Spectrum (Sophie Wilson's BASIC interpreter). The BBC Micro: Hermann Hauser calls them
Duration: 03:36
The rest of the Computing World hated BASIC, and 'here come the masses', unstructured programming (GOTO)
Duration: 03:07
Loss of the ability to programme in the early 2000s - Eben Upton and his Raspberry Pi. Apple and Microsoft both have a lot to thank BASIC for
Duration: 02:38
Credits
Duration: 00:05Radio 4: Codes that Changed the World
1. Fortran
First broadcast: 6th April 2015
Duration 13:56
Aleks Krotoski tells the story of the languages that have been used to talk to machines. 1/5. Fortran: The language that helped put men on the moon and harness the atom.
2. Cobol
First broadcast: 7th April 2015
Duration 13:55
Aleks Krotoski tells the story of computer languages. 2/5. Cobol: Inefficient, verbose and ugly, yet by the 1990s, 80 per cent of the world's business software was written in it.
3. Basic
First broadcast: 8th April 2015
Duration 13:56
Aleks Krotoski tells the story of computer languages. 3/5. Basic: As language of choice for home computing in the 1980s, Basic became iconic
Now playing
4. Java
First broadcast: 9th April 2015
Duration 13:44
Aleks Krotoski tells the story of computer languages. 4/5. Java: The programming language that people probably interact with on a daily basis more than any other.
5. The Tower of Babel
First broadcast: 10th April 2015
Duration 13:52
Aleks Krotoski tells the story of computer languages. 5/5. The Tower of Babel: Aleks likens today's digital world to a reverse Tower of Babel.