VB Story 2-My personal connection

That year our faculty got our first personal computer, it immediately became the sweetheart of everybody, and everyone can't wait to have a hand on it! And it could run BASIC! There was no hard disk, you need a boot diskette to start it, then you insert a floppy disk that contain the BASIC program in order to program BASIC. I can't remember what version of BASIC was it, could be GWBASIC, a dialect of BASIC developed by Microsoft from BASICA, originally for Compaq.

Although the PC was comparatively primitive, it could run powerful program especially in solving mathematical problems, even by today's standard. I still can remember a program that can sort numbers in ascending order, let me list down the subroutine here:

510 For J=1 to N-1

520 For I=1 to N-J

530 If A(I)<=A(I+1) Then 570

540 Let T=A(I)

550 Let A(I)=A(I+1)

560 Let A(I+1)=T

570 Next I

580 Next J

Can you figure out the logic? Maybe you could transform this into a VB6 program. Anyway, BASIC was the preferred computer language of the college students because it was so easy to learn, even though we have to do FORTRAN (Formula Translation) in our coursework. I picked up interest in programming from using BASIC but some how or rather left BASIC a few years later and ventured into database programming using DBASE II . I was asked to compile a database program to process students' academic results.

It was only after many years that I went back to BASIC again, that was the time Gates already made a fortune out of his software business. It was the late eighties. I bought a PC that run on MS_DOS, with 4MB RAM, 50MB Hard disk, and its processor was a 386 machines produced by Epson. I was a little surprise that a version of BASIC was included in DOS, and it was QBASIC. With the advent of QBASIC, DOS Based BASIC has reached the greatest height. It has done away with line numbers, and it could program colors as well as music, what a great improvement! There was also a more powerful version of QBASIC by the name of QuickBAsIC in the sense that it could compile the programs into EXE files.

And finally QBASIC also became obsolete with the arrival of the famous Windows, and Visual Basic, but the legacy of BASIC continues...........