WILLIAM HARMER
[address omitted]
TS Bulletin Amateur Newsletter — Supplement #A-1994 — Aug.18, 1994
© Aug. 18,1994 by Bill J. Harmer, Ottawa, All rights reserved
Times are changing. Woodstock 1994 has just run its muddy course, and the cries of liberation from ‘the system’ that brought the ‘computers to the people’ movement onto the fringes of the peace movement and an underground press freed due to technology, all that 60’s stuff, flood back. It seems so recent. How things have changed! The computers that ‘the people’ did get, have become part of an urban pieceworker/24-hour on-call-employee, economic system which is not particularly liberating at all. The cheapness of publishing has reached the point, however, that personal publishing is with-in the reach of just about anyone with a minimum of know-how. But it has led to a new form of co-op publishing, which is something similar to network publishing/BBS text files, in that the writers for a new generation of small, personal, and specialized publications, commonly called ‘Zines’ (short for magazines or fan-magazines’), may have never met face-to-face, and send their material in mainly by modem, (and not to BBS systems or commercial networks, mostly but person-to-person), starting the session with a voice telephone conversation. This means that contrary to what George of Toronto Sinclair User Club said recently, it is quite normal today to run a publication with the officers/writers/editors spread out across the country. It is not even necessary to have a modem, (I don’t), since the bandwidth of a 50¢ stamp is considerable when used to carry a diskette across country, Anyway, times are changing, and it would be a shame to see the user Group movement fold, just on the basis of things like this.
All this brings back not-too-pleasant memories of the Ottawa TS group folding. While the club newsletter folded, this one continued on a reduced scale but there are no plans ever to simply halt. The last year saw one supplementary newsletter like this, and perhaps the photo-reduced, small format newsletter has more issues left to go. So it continues indefinitely if sporadically, in other words. The only change is the decision to take material out of the public domain since with few newsletters left to republish it, that makes little sense. The original reason for putting material in the public domain in the cost, (aside from a challenge from the Texas TS group), was to facilitate copying without red tape of asking for permission or worrying about legal technicalities. Now all such permission has been withdrawn, since for material other than that submitted by myself to other newsletters (and there is still tons of still in drawers here, unpublished), it looks like there will be few hobby publications to publish them. So I might as well keep the copyright since some of the material may get sliced into my own writing on various subjects (techno-trends and techno-history is the current writing interest in a relate field).
But there are other, rather important reason to continue. There are things to do. What can this newsletter offer? One thing is celebration of the liberation from a stuffy educational system that has lost its touch, at least for education of the ordinary student in subjects of close job and modern mathematical relevancy, this liberation brought by the near universal availability of home computers. We can add practical help with reader self education especially in programming. And the final one: a boost for BASIC, the programming language despised by the educational establishment, but still, just about the only programming language a beginner can learn, almost alone. Since a beginner cannot learn it completely alone, there lies a task for such a newsletter as this, emulators, simulators, word processors and databases all look remarkably simple from within, if the simplest possible BASIC programs are used to explain them. Computer software is to mathematical education today, what reading and writing was by way of a con commitment, in ancient times. So here is to a revised newsletter, featuring, BASIC and TS home computers.
Great Blue blazers and Other Incendiary Topics
The question of why anyone would turn their coat and run into the arms of the blue-blazing IBM clone world, has again reared its ugly flaming head. Why not? They certainly are cheap, 286’s selling for a couple of hundred used here (even though those like the writer see no need to trade in the 8088, with less than a full unit of Norton SI seed). The clone world has finally caught up with the pocket-book size of even ZX-TS users. Perhaps in the future, outside of museums, the only TS computing, will be inside clones with software emulators. But that does not mean that the TS BASIC’S need be abandoned for others. And since CP/M emulators for clones are easy to find and cheap (How is free? Cheap enough?), the CP/M side of the Z-80 (and former QL CP/M emulator users) Sinclair computers can continue too. (Maybe CP/M command line use will live almost as long as MS DOS command line, now that MS Windows and its quasi-clones, are replacing MS DOS command line interface in clones. And it all started in DEC computers and Victorian era telegraph systems, according to my historical techno-archaeology.) So, why not both?
The second question is, why not turn TS groups into programming workshops, specializing in old computer hobbyist languages like PASCAL and even BASIC interpreter programming. This thought was greeted with terrific ennui every time I would propose it at meetings of our now-defunct Ottawa-Hull TS User Group in various ways and versions, over the last years. At least it would have helped the kids, some new youngsters coming to the last meetings of our club, looking for such talk and tutoring in techno-literacy. Whether BASIC deserved it or not, academics shunned it, making our BASIC an orphan language just as the home-type computers were orphaned by their manufacturing supporters in the 1980’s. A good academic question is whether it was BASIC or the computers being orphaned that ended most user groups.
“What To Do?” Is Today’s Question
The question now, is what to do with our hobby and the organizations that have been painstakingly built up My suggestion is to keep them going in some fashion for their educational value. Kids today do not have much chance of really learning the interesting and essential mechanics, at school. It is a mathematical job world out there today, and the school system is, pardon my French, royally confounded when it comes to teaching the same, and the fundamentals of structure why it all works, when it comes to computers. To make a bold prediction, we will see that in the next 50 years, computers as boxes processing separable software, will die out, (except for niche markets). Software will be embedded in ever-cheapened boxes and world economic dominance will go to whatever major power (economically) whose kids master this best. And it is the computer user groups with their expertise in combining hardware knowledge as it relates to low level software and programming affecting it, that know this and can teach it. End of sermon. Let’s just not waste this opportunity to give our kids a boost up. There is no one else; just believe me.
The Problem With BASIC — (Part I)
Within a newsletter which has just (see previous page) been thoroughly and wholeheartedly committed to continuing support of BASIC as a computer language for those rare individuals who cannot resist taking things apart, in this case types of computer software, to see exactly what makes them tick, starting by offering- a gratuitous criticism of BASIC may seem just slightly peculiar. However, let us be honest about our favorite computer language it does have its theoretical flaws. The fact that no other full language was available to most home computer owners in the 1980’s, (and buyers consistently rejected home computers with FORTH installed in ROM rather than BASIC), may seem to point to the fact that we BASIC programmers are simply making a virtue out of what started as a necessity and became a habit. But be that as it may, true or not, BASIC is both defensible and meriting some criticism. (About FORTH, one might say that it too was not a complete language in that it never, at least in its versions of the 1980’s got a built-in floating point number data type or stack, and may have failed due to lack of such features which would have made it easier to use, like screen handling and graphics modification commands. Imagine bit twiddling with fast FORTH.)
One of the criticisms of BASIC revolves around some of the structure that it lacks, even though it abounds in features in many dialects But if you look at its competitors, like the structured Pascal and MODULA, you will see they lacked a lot of features that make BASIC easy to use, and cannot be considered, especially MODULA which never became popular (as it deserved to be), full featured. In addition, Pascal, it seems, did not start life without the GOTO, philosophical phobia trigger of so many BASIC critics. ALGOL, Pascal’s predecessor, much praised for being rational at the time, by the usual purists, used GOTO, long before it was discovered that ALGOL programs without GOTO were always an alternative for the programmer, something not realized previous to the letter to the editor of ACM/Communications, by Prof. Dijkstra (1968) and his earlier remarks (1965) and work of van Wijngaarden, in 1968. (Ref. Yourdon)
A second criticism laid on BASIC, is that its many dialects make it a nonstandard and unstandardizable language. Of course this was a result of BASIC prospering and spreading, the languages which died or backed into shrinking niche markets early on, never getting to that point. (What if Pascal had prospered to the point where TURBO Pascal had been just one dialect that had moved far away from standard Pascal. Actually, on second thought it is, with a claim for at least three incompatible dialects, all of them various vintages of TURBO Pascal!) As our local group member and Pascal booster , David Solly remarked once, those who criticize BASIC for its dialects, likely do not realize that it is just showing the behavior characteristic of languages, and more notable among natural languages like English, French and Dutch, ones Dave was quite familiar with, being a language buff that is, developing differences that we call dialects, etc. and just plain evolving with time.
Looking at the alternative those critics of BASIC offer today, C language, one sees that it lacks the logic admired in Pascal and MODULA, has a host of dialects now, that hated feature of BASIC by some of its critics, and is in reality a souped up, stripped down hacker language, flagrantly exhibiting a third point usually used as a criticism of BASIC, the way BASIC was used and abused by hackers and small time programmers in the microcomputer era.
But BASIC does have its faults. Let us be quick to admit them. But these are not unconnected with its virtues. Its virtue was that when it was devised, in 1965, long before microcomputers it was designed to run on terminals, and its line-at-a-time interpretation which slows it and reduces its structure to a rather fragmented form was simply necessary, given roll paper scrolling and primitive editing, lack of computer time to share, etc. If things had gone differently, this also could have been a big advantage in the world of microcomputers, in adapting BASIC interpreters to simple substitutes for true, low-level multi-tasking, but that never caught on in microcomputers, CP/M and MS DOS modeling themselves on OS/8 and OS/10 of DEC rather than UNIX.
The second weakness of BASIC is its reliance on variable length data structures of strings and later disk files, like DEC operating systems and terminals that were originally used by telegraph companies to send messages of various lengths. Anyway, that is too important a point not to discuss in detail which we can do another time. Stay tuned for article II.