Back to BASIC

(Wow...two posts today. I am so unmotivated!)

I used to code in BASIC on the Commodore64 back in the 80s and graduated to QBasic later. Keep in mind, this was in grade school/middle school when I was between the ages of 8 and 13 (note that is 20+ years gone by). My friends and I harnessed the power of our computers to write cool little "text-based" (aka choose-your-own-path) games based on our experience with Zork (!!!) and the Choose Your Own Adventure books that we read like they were going out-of-style. [NOTE: Many of the CYOA books were republished in 2000 -- http://www.cyoa.com/ -- so now our kids can read them too!]

My buddy Ryan and I both had Commodore64 machines, Eric had an Apple IIE (his parents were educators). Ryan had saved up enough money to buy a 5 1/4" floppy disk drive, the Apple IIE came with one, and I was stuck recording my games to magnetic cassette on my cassette drive...oh the technology!

Well, I just found out that there is an implentation of a browser-based BASIC called -- NG-BASIC -- that allows you to do the simplest of BASIC functions, like back in the day! I'm going to download this and see if I can remember anything from back in grade school. Too cool!