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Yes! I learned BASIC on the BBC Micro. You turned it on, and you got a BASIC interpreter. It was the most painless, most fun experience. Graphics, sound,, etc., were all available by reading the User Guide.

I couldn't have afforded buying one, but my university had half a dozen.

I wish kids today could get that.

2 comments

The closest I've found to having a modern experience to programming in that manner is DragonRuby Game Toolkit [0]. It's not free (with some exceptions for eligible users and indie game developers), but it does offer a standard version for a one-off payment, which is the version I have. It's sold as a game dev toolkit but it brings back those same memories of BASIC for me. I firmly believe that it could be a very viable method of introducing programming as well.

If you bought either of the two itch.io bundles "Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality" or "Indie bundle for Palestinian Aid", then you have the Standard license already included in that bundle. It's well worth a look IMO.

(Not affiliated other than a very happy user.)

[0] https://dragonruby.org/toolkit/game

This was my attempt at providing easy graphics to kids inspired by the BBC Micro: https://github.com/akkartik/mu/tree/main/shell

Here's a 6-minute demo: https://archive.org/details/akkartik-mu-2021-06-09

Requires Qemu, though. And no sound yet, unfortunately. I'd love contributions there or elsewhere.