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The BASIC language snippet is perhaps not as appropriate to remember Steve Jobs as some Pascal code would be, since the development of the Lisa featured Pascal and many of us learned that language as a consequence. Despite many years teaching BASIC in those early times of microcomputers, Pascal is still one of my favorites.



Well, the BASIC language code is my tribute because it was on the Apple II that I tried my hand at computer programming for the first time. That preceded the Lisa by some years, and was an immensely more popular machine than Lisa, if I could guess at sales numbers.

I was a 7th or 8th grade kid at the time, and the only computers that were in schools at that time were Commodore PET or Apple II. Since the Apple II had a color monitor, of course I was drawn to that. My dad was a 6th grade teacher and could bring home the schools one Apple II sometimes on weekends. I would stay up late programming or playing Oregon Trail. That was the time frame when the floating point BASIC was just becoming available for the Apple II. Up to that point in time, they only had integer BASIC.

A few years later, I did some programming in Pascal on the first IBM PC models, the one with the Charlie Chaplin advertisements. Same time frame I had a couple of friends who had the Atari 400 and we programmed in whatever version of BASIC that thing had available - I think the BASIC was on a cartridge IIRC.

Then later Turbo Pascal on PC. After that Fortran 77 on DEC mainframes, then HP Basic on HP 300 series, then Matlab on PC, and finally VBA inside of Excel.

My brain works in structured top-down design as it pertains to programming. The most difficult one to learn was the VBA, because of this. To have so much flexibility on subroutines that weren't really even 'sub', was hard to wrap my brain around. It's what the kids do by 2nd nature now, but I still have a hard time thinking of a GUI as the heart of a program.

So, for me, the 'illegal' endless loop was first discovered in BASIC, on an Apple II that bragged about the 64 (kB?) of RAM that it had on a sticker that was slapped onto the space bar. Late into the wee morning hours. That's my first impression of the Steves. While we were encouraged to fill the screen with "Hello" with a loop like that, later on we would get smacked down hard for illegal loops like that, even though the language and run-time compiler allowed for it. So, in defiance of my 'official' programming teachers, I gave the endless loop in Jobs' spirit as a tribute.

-Scott

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