On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 12:01 PM, Joseph S. Barrera III via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 4:39 AM, David Gesswein via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
I think this was common. You would start learning assmelby and making little routines to call from Basic to do things that couldn't be done in Basic or were too slow.
That was my progression as well (BASIC to assembly). Given the constraints of the personal computers in the late 70s, there weren't too many other options. Our school had a UCSD Pascal compiler for our IMSAI 8080 but it took forever to compile anything.
BASIC and assembly are actually similar in that they are both very simple and unstructured languages, where most control flow is done with either goto (jmp) or gosub (jsr). Mostly what you'll miss from BASIC is easy string manipulation and for/next loops.
per my previous reply, regarding there's really no natural progression I went from 8080 assembly, while homebrewing computers before high school then some more 6800 assembly after building the 680b kit then to Assembly, Basic and Fortran IV on the high school computer, Honeywell H-1646 (dual H316, same as the IMP on Arpanet) and as a hobby, some more Basic on the Apple ][ my big brother bought for us, and also on my buddies TRS80 model I then in college, some more Fortran and Pascal on the Northstar Advantage CP/M during that time, on some hobbyist projects, more Pascal and C language on the C64 and this just went on, to the C coding on the Amiga and SBC's like the embedded 68HC11, ColdFire and this varied between the many diff jobs, and more hobbyist projects with or without competitions, I still like to pickup a new language from time to time between the hardware projects One lately being the "Processing" derivative of Java, which has a nice standard suite of libraries and more recently using Python [especially since they have a compiler now] And then next some others such as the R language for its machine learning features So there was really no distinct linear progression unless your a CS major, with it's many courses to teach the fundamentals, so then in school you are forced to take prereq's in order to advance I think this goes on even for today