The History of QBASIC and my history with it
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- Опубликовано: 16 июл 2024
- If you had a DOS PC in the 1990s, chances are it came with QBASIC. In this video I talk about how it came to be, from the earliest IBM PC with BASIC in ROM to... well, PCs with BASIC not in ROM. I then explain how MS-DOS's bundled-in BASIC captivated the imagination of a younger me, with a little help from a school programming club.
Yes, It's a #doscember video. It's released in December and it is largely about DOS.
There are also games (DOS games, natch) you've probably not seen before. They're not very good, but that doesn't change the fact you've probably not seen them, unless you're watching this video for the second, third or even fifth time, an activity I'm fully on board with.
And where else are you going to see someone hold up a copy of The Revolutionary Guide to QBASIC, eh?
Program Listing:
0:00 How I fail at retro gaming RUclips
0:55 Nobody saw that coming did they?
1:28 Transitional bits
2:40 Let's hope this doesn't wind up all the ST owners
3:18 The beginning, finally
4:17 IBM PC DOS
5:28 That's a lot of BASICs.
6:02 That which shall not be named
6:38 Oh wait so all of that was pointless
6:52 BIOS copying explained by virtual chalkboard
8:58 I just wanted to show off that wild Compaq bundled software
9:58 I get into GW-BASIC... sike it's just truck sims again
12:14 QuickBasic
13:15 The trouble with DOS
15:15 A game, at last! Not mine. Geoff's.
15:47 Wait, I thought you said you programmed BASIC?
16:32 I really hope none of those 1996-1998 filenames are "hilariously" offensive in a teenage way
16:47 Authentic imagery of the British school system
17:48 The programming club approaches
18:13 Self-demystification and enraged Logo fans
19:00 Social dynamics
19:26 I lied. Sort of.
19:55 Timberwolf's Games: Fast Driver
21:28 A Graphical Interlude
22:01 Ultima Net: too cool for school
24:08 I fall behind
24:54 Timberwolf's Games: Oval Racer
25:05 Timberwolf's Games: Velocity
26:08 Timberwolf's Games: Velocity 2
27:45 Timberwolf's Games: Flying Eye
28:30 Crocodile Clips!
29:06 The end in sight
Yes, I only have high... er, medium resolution pictures of my first computer at the point when it had already been upgraded to a K6/200, and by that point was an old PC we had kicking around spare to be a server for our student house. Digital cameras weren't exactly household items in the 286 era. Maybe if you're all really nice I'll dig around in the nostalgia box and see if I've got an out-of-focus film photo from a cheap, light-bleeding 35mm fixed lens camera for the next time I mention it.
Comments are pre-reviewed to avoid spam. I aim to publish all comments, including dissent, but overly pedantic or negative ones may be moderated. Hearing about different experiences and what things were like in other countries adds a lot to the video! Please try to do so in a positive way while remembering that if I had to explain every minor international difference the video would be 2 hours long and boring, rather than 29 minutes long and boring. Failing that, at least make me laugh.
Bonus Fact: many of the QuickBasic language features we know and (possibly) love from QBASIC only came along in later versions, and if it looks like I'm struggling to get a program together in the footage of QuickBasic 2.0 it's because everything I'm used to is yet to exist!
Bonus Game: spot the error in the example "kind of C program I wrote when I was 12" section - worse still, something which was widely suggested by many C tutorials in magazines and books of the time!
#doscember #qbasic 
Игры
I miss the 90's. All the interesting soft and hardware developments. Keep the content coming :)
I may have cheered out loud in real life when I saw you hold up your copy of "The Revolutionary Guide to QBasic". Mine is still sitting on my shelf. I say mine; I borrowed it from a friend in 1996 and never gave it back. Sorry Tom.
Wow. A younger me exits online. I started with BASICA on 8" floppies on CP/M and wrote a speech synthesiser using and AY8910 chip and a CP/M parallel port. When PCs caught on I went through the basics until QBASIC. But then I got a job at a hotel company that wanted to link accounts and payroll across all properties and let me break free with the ultimate basic experience - Microsoft QB4.5 It was wonderful. I was being paid for what I would have done for free. FTP, QB4.5 and me ruled the known world. At least for a while. 10 years or so.
QB4.5 was, and probably still is, a breath taking version. I like to think there are hotels still out there running my progs without even knowing their EXE files are my compiled Basic.
The first 45 seconds was a great hook and I'll definitely watch the rest.
Love watching computer history. First came across Microsoft Windows in the Mastertronic game Finders Keepers in 1985 where it used the Microsoft Windowmation Menu system. Far ahead of its time then.
Coop video! I totally remember doing much of the same things, adding fake loadint screens, adding coop menu bars, learning avout graphics and how to eliminate flicker.. I got a great book about programming fractals in Qbasic.
In the 90's my older brother started making a text adventure/RPG in QBASIC. I was happy to just run/play Gorillaz and Snake.
Wonderful stuff. BASIC was lovely as you could DO stuff. As simple as they were, making something move around the screen that you controlled was just astounding!
The Microsoft BASICs on the PC were nice for this because they had so many built-in graphics commands. You didn't have to learn much to get a picture on screen!
I wrote a stat program to display population 3d histogram of data in QBasic in 1985 in MD training. Used a AT&T PC with 2, 360k floppies. My program was easier to use and more functional that the Training program mainframe. Still have that machine in my attic.
This was a really fun discussion, and your memories of learning to program with some friends and spare time were really relatable!
I think there was a nice accessibility to this stuff. It really wasn't a huge stretch from the DOS commands you needed to know in order to use the computer, to being able to write a BASIC program.
That pic of the Acorn Electron brings back memories. I could not afford one but me and a friend spent a Sat afternoon in Curry's turning it into a musical keyboard from a program in the manual. Took 4 hours to type and debug (fix typo's). Incredible to think back then the staff not only were happy about it but encouraged us! Happy days!
I was a bit too young to write any proper programs on an 8-bit, I mostly just played games (I have a couple of Electron ones to cover on my backlog!), but I do miss shops having big demonstration setups. I remember Game in Woking setting up a load of stuff on their A1200 and 386 so I could choose which driving game I wanted for Christmas!
On the other hand, maybe Curry's were just pleased to have someone making something other than,
10 PRINT "CURRYS SMELLS OF POO";
20 GOTO 10
...
I'm surprisingly enthralled with your video, well done!! Looking forward to more :)
Thanks, hopefully there are a few more in a similar vein where I go back to these old games and, 25 years later, try to make a few improvements to them.
love watching your old creations!
All I remember from QBASIC was playing Gorillas. I didn’t even know you could program stuff. I was just 8 in 1994 and as Windows 95 took over and simplified things I never properly learned DOS or Windows 3.1.
Ah, that's where I started with it! I used to wonder why this one game was so complicated, where if you messed up any of the instructions you'd been given to run it you'd end up staring at a blue screen with all this code. Until I found that screen let you edit the size of the explosions...
So I have the same journey you did in terms of tech stack. GREAT video. Almost tears in bringing one.
Now, something really pops in top my mind. I assume you are british, how popular were the IBM Dos Clones in UK back in those days? I went last year to Camdrige's computer history museum and there was a lot of BBCmicro and other brands of the sort, so how different was the martket in there to the one here in America?
You might need to ask someone a bit older for the full story, as I didn't set foot in an office until the late '90s!
As far as home usage was concerned, it was almost all the small 8-bit micros for the '80s, particularly the domestic offerings of the Sinclair ZX81/Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Acorn Electron although the C64 was popular. The BBC was extremely common in education but expensive so rare for home users, it had a reputation as the "posh kids" computer.
The Amiga and Atari ST took off relatively late in their life cycle, the watershed moment for the Amiga here was the A500 "Batman Pack" in 1989 and they became very common in the early '90s. But a lot of people stayed on the 8-bits, I had a friend who was still using a CPC464 well into the decade.
There's also the wildcard of the Amstrad PCW word processors, Z80-based computers dedicated for office tasks. They sold well early on, being a lot cheaper than a PC and having a decent high-resolution display.
Also in that era was the Acorn Archimedes - it was very popular in schools and a few people had them at home too. If you've been to Cambridge they may have given you the "rich schools had Nimbuses, everyone else had Acorn" talk! The original 80186-based Nimbus is a bit of a wild card in this discussion as they are PC-like, but not strict IBM compatibles, even though they did run Windows 2.x and DOS a lot of programs didn't work thanks to the unique hardware and memory layout. Still, the schools which had them moved on to the Nimbus/286 and later RM line, which were more straightforward clones, so if you went to school in a well-funded area you'd have definitely encountered PCs in it from 1992 or thereabouts.
At home, though, they were *rare*. The only people I remember having them worked as programmers and generally had one so they could take work home. Cost was a big part of it; the average UK household didn't have the disposable income at the time. Again the name Amstrad comes up, because they were one of the first manufacturers to get clone PCs down to a vaguely affordable level, so for the few people who did have a PC it was common for it to be a PC1512 or one of the later models.
The point at which the PC really took off was the middle of the decade - I think if you take enough people my age the "average" first PC was a Pentium 75 with Windows 95, SB16-compatible sound card and a CD-ROM. This was the point at which the 3-way Intel/AMD/Cyrix battle was really getting going, and PCs started getting more affordable just at the point the country was in economic recovery, and attitudes to credit started changing to the point people were happy to buy a big-ticket item like a computer and pay it off monthly.
This came out a lot longer than I expected but the other thing I notice comparing our market to the US is it seemed to be about 18 months behind in terms of the hardware people were buying; LGR mentions getting his first 486/66 about two years before I'd ever seen one. Especially in the schools, where even our relatively well-off one still had at least one lab equipped with 286s well into 1997.
That really takes me back. I never did really figure sprites out.
Excellent video once again. Really, you deserve millions of subscribers. Can't believe these don't have more views. "PC Speaker Wizardry" is still my favorite episode.
I'm interested in computer history, especially this kind of stuff that was before my time. In fact, I'm currently learning BASIC even though it has hardly any relevance today. Still not apt enough to write games of my own. ;)
I'm covering niche topics, and worse still (in RUclips terms) usually a different niche topic with each video. I'm pleasantly surprised as many people stay subscribed as they do! If I was doing this in real life I'd be lucky if I found 20 people willing to listen to my nonsense for up to 30 minutes at a time...
@@TimberwolfK It's always better that someone covers niche topics instead of no one covering niche topics for fear of not getting views and money.
There are 8000000000 people, so whatever the topic, there's always someone who finds it interesting.
Excellent video, PCs passed me by as a lad. We had BBC micros and my last School year they were swapped out for RM Nimbus. Lessons changed from programming and making endless menus in BASIC on the beeb to staring at the Nimbus not really knowing what to do with it (apart from Paint)
Only now do I know about QBasic! Thank you.
I love basic , its prely logical and works how one would think it should. You do not even need to truely learn it just copy out a program line by line seeing how everythng has order and meaning.
That's how most of these were made! I love looking at them now with the benefit of many more years of experience, so many piece of repetition where I didn't know how to structure code to use variables, so printing something in three different colours is three identical PRINT statements each with a different COLOR statement before it...
Nice. I should look through the old family PCs for my crappy basic games! I've still got my first experiments at 3D rendering and DirectX (from the late 90s) up on the web though :D
I just found my new favorite channel.
Man owns the most fishbowled monitor ever made.
Very good. I didn’t even know there was a programming club but I think that was because I was too busy playing football in the playground at lunch (note your limitation to just Logo and QBASIC) was nothing compared to Fullbrook limiting us to playing football with a plastic ball not much bigger than a tennis ball and with holes in it! This football over programming decision probability could have predicted that only 3 years after graduating from a Computer Science degree I hung up my (not very good) C++/Java programming gloves and decided to call myself an engineer instead, as I discovered that was much easier and basically consists of just following the manual for combining various clever things made by smarter people (i.e. professional lego).
Oh god, you've just reminded me of the balls. Especially the way any vigorous play would result in the thing being crushed and you'd have to stop play for a few minutes while someone with small fingers tries to make the ball ball-shaped again, or someone runs to their bag to get a replacement.
After a worryingly large number of years in "professional" programming, most of that is following the manual to combine things other, smarter people have made, just much less tactile and satisfying.
Flipping awesome video.
My personal programming history...
BBC Basic on an Electron
ST Basic > Fast Basic
Amiga Basic > HiSoft Basic > AMOS Basic
QBasic > Visual Basic > Adios Basic > Delphi Pascal 3.0
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. A long period of time
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. Hmm, I Need to program something now...
Python
Had me subscribe within 30 seconds. This is my kinda content haha
Loved QBasic.
I've a lot of fondness for it. Especially the social aspect of it being what everybody I knew had, we were all working on the same language with roughly the same skill level.
The ony problem with qbasic was no compiler
2:40 I drive a Focus ST and I am so #triggered right now. 🙃
I spent so many hours writing QBasic never managed anything close to what you made. Wish I switched to C then too rather than Visual basic!!
There's a lot of wasted childhood went into those games...
Great video. Check out qb64 man.
I did have a play with it a while back when I was seeing if I could get Velocity 2 SE to run at a decent speed. Works well. There's a small point of pride in still making things that would run on a Pentium-133 using OG QBASIC, though :D
Your school was a bit posh having PCs. We had BBC Micros in the room we were allowed to use at lunch and Acorn Archimedes for GCSE/A Level classes.
I had this very discussion with one of the people at the Cambridge computing history museum! The counties with big budgets bought RM Nimbus kit (which later became more generic PCs), the ones without the money to throw around held on to their BBCs and then continued with Acorn.
So, you have proof that you created the original Flappy Bird? :)
Heh. Flying Eye is totally a clone of any number of scrolling-landscape aircraft games on the PC, I'm pretty sure what I was aiming at when I made it was a slightly fancier version of Sopwith (1984)
"Fast Driver" is still a better song than Mr.Blobby