Atari Basic

When I was a kid, my dad got an Atari 800 and taught me BASIC programming.

First of all, I just saw online that an Atari 800 cost about $1,000 in 1980 which, at the time, was a shit-ton of money, especially for a computer that had (a max) of 48K of RAM and a 1.8 Mhz processor.  I remember that when we first got it, we could only load programs from a cassette tape. You could hear the program being loaded.  It screeched rapid fire morse-code through the TV speaker (there were no monitors), and it took about 90 seconds to load a program.  Later on, we got a 5 1/4" disk drive.  I forget what the disk capacity was then.....

Anyway, BASIC. Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. BASIC was perfect for a kid. It was so forgiving of bad programming.  First of all, you had to hit "return" after every line of code and it immediately told you when you used the wrong syntax. So, if you accidentally typed "prunt", you knew it immediately.

Also, Atari BASIC let you use the GOTO statement, which forgave a multitude of programming sins.  As a child programmer, the idea of a program being a logical group of individual subroutines just didn't click with me.  Most of my programming was a collection of "oh yeahs" and "oh waits."  GOTO allowed me to hop all over the place....all I had to do was type in GOTO 50 and the program hopped to line 50.  I could have the program jump from line 20 to line 200 and back to line 20, and as a result, I created programs that that were spastic and squirrely.  

   
When I returned to programming in college, I discovered that GOTO statements were no longer a part of the programming vernacular.  When I was a Freshman, my old Computer Science teacher, who freely smoked cigarettes in his office (he had tenure) and wore a black turtleneck like a yellow, crusty Steve Jobs, yelled at me for asking how to "GOTO" line 80.

My 17 year old son has my old Atari 800 and he loves playing Star Raiders .  I need to Hyperwarp my way over to Ebay and find another one and show it to my students....they will either be blown away by it or  extremely non-impressed.  I'm guessing the former.