For someone just getting into this weird craft, BASIC felt positively thaumaturgic. It was spellcasting: You uttered words that brought iron and silicon to life, and made them do things.
With BASIC, in contrast, the machine responded instantly. You wrote a few lines, hit RUN, and boom-the machine interpreted it, right then and there.
Programming was like thinking out loud... this transformed coding into a conversation with the machine. It felt less like doing Very Important Design and more like just messing around.
BASIC created the world's first mass open-source culture. People shared code freely. Each month, Compute magazine printed reams of BASIC mailed in by hobbyists.
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