New Hampshire's Basic Historical Marker
Funny to see a local newspaper story perspective on this, great read! My favorite line, “Everybody who has ever typed a GOTO command can feel proud.” It’s certainly an interesting idea to have New Hampshire identified as a geeky state.
My second computer was a Commodore 64 (Apple IIe was first). I fondly remember spending a ton of time heads down with the ol’ 64 and my Basic friend. I still have a copy of some of the programs I wrote back in the 6th grade and even a school project where I wrote out the code on a yellow legal pad and turned it in as a school project. My instructor was kind but admitted that she had no idea what she was looking at.
The biggest project in Basic was to write my own banking software. My Father worked in banking and his bank had recently gotten their first computer system, unix based terminals. I thought I could make it better so I created my own version in Basic. I even had a mechanism for a user to log in. Eventually the program got too big and I started hitting limitations of the hardware, mainly the insane and often-horrid tape drive. And yes, I did NOT have a disk drive because I couldn’t afford it!