I first discovered this little gem while poking around on my Tandy 1000 RL computer back in 1991. Because I was familiar with various versions of BASIC already, I was able to fire it up and immediately begin writing fairly simple applications. However, there were differences to Atari’s version of BASIC, and no discernable way to figure that out without a book or some other documentation. I poked around on a few of my favourite Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and found a small cache of programs written in GW-BASIC. I downloaded each of them, spending all of my download credits in the process. I poured over them line by line and found myself having more questions than answers.

Many new programmers today expect there to be some sort of documentation available when they learn a new technology. It’s an expectation that has evolved over the years. Today, it would be practically unheard of if you couldn’t find some resource describing the software on the Internet, or some blurb in a book, or even bundled with the product. However, when I started looking for a book on GW-BASIC (version 3.23 to be exact), it was darn near impossible. The people I spoke with had no understanding of programming, let alone a specific language. The computer sections in the store were spartan compared to the sections you find in stores today. In fact, several years later, I still needed to special order the books I wanted through the book store; even today, I usually order my titles through Amazon since a store like Indigo usually doesn’t have them in stock.

I eventually wandered into a local computer store – I was attracted by a demo of Wing Commander II playing on one of their expensive new 486 machines, so I went in to ask them if they knew where I could get my hands on some material. I spoke with the owner and he seemed to recall seeing a book for BASIC in the back of the store. He left for a couple of minutes and returned with two books under his arm. One was for the exact version of GW-BASIC I was looking for and the other was a compatible book for MS-DOS. I was ecstatic and I nearly fainted when he gave them to me for free. I don’t remember what I said to the man that day, but I’m sure it wasn’t adequate.

I wrote so many programs in that environment. I think I still have a few of them today on floppy diskette. They were simple at first, like simple word games such as hangman. However, it wasn’t long before I discovered how to increase the resolution and colour depth and draw simple graphics. I had already written code for the Atari which made use of pixel plotting routines or simple geometric shapes. There were pre-canned routines the Atari provided for drawing shapes, along with a few parameters for style, colour, and shape. GW-BASIC was similar but provided several more commands and options. With a smaller font and a higher resolution, debugging within BASIC became more feasible. I still couldn’t scroll, but at least I could view a larger portion of the code on the screen.

Sound was also possible through the PLAY command, or if you were so inclined, through a custom routine written in assembly language which could be written to generate all sorts of sounds like noise or even speech. I had converted several songs using music sheets and converted them to their GW-BASIC equivalent. Not terribly exciting, but it did make for some creative demos which seemed to impress onlookers.

Some of the more interesting projects involved controlling external devices like printers. I must have programmed my software to use every conceivable option available through my Star NX 1000 II dot-matrix printer. I could instruct it to use standard type effects like bold and italics when printing text, but I could also program it to print graphical data like images and shapes. I even created printed graphics for the Mandel Brot set by rendering the fractal to my printer instead of the screen, one pixel at a time.

Perhaps the most interesting device was a robotic arm which was controlled through a series of commands dispatched through the parallel port. I didn’t have access to such a device at home but my school eventually purchased one, so one of the teachers decided to create a contest for students. Whoever could program the robotic arm first, would win a special prize. The task was to pick up a piece of chalk and draw a picture consisting of at least four shapes. It was a fun contest and I walked away with a pass which granted me as much lab time as I wanted.

Before I upgraded to a new machine and moved to a new version of MS-DOS, I was intimately familiar with every command in that book, even the more obscure commands like CHAIN and PCOPY. Although, the really obscure commands were still a mystery. I didn’t know you could actually write assembly language routines in GW-BASIC using DEF USR and USR commands until sometime later.

Categories: PC, Programming, Reflections, Software
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