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BBC Basic: the people's language

Posted on 23 Nov 2009 at 06:31

25 years on

But although many people haven't used it since the 1980s, BBC Basic didn't die with the Micro. Russell used his extensive knowledge of the BBC project and the processors of the time to create an IBM PC version of BBC Basic in 1986. And many years later, in 2001, he completed an 18-month project to code BBC Basic for Windows. "People come to me and say 'if only we knew this existed earlier'. Sadly, there's no large organisation to spread the word any more."

Nevertheless, BBC Basic still has a loyal band of devotees: it's still in active service in applications as diverse as storyboarding for a children's cartoon called Hana's Helpline to controlling power generators for helicopters made by Cambridge Dynamics Ltd. According to Wilson, it was even used to create the original systems behind Who Wants to be a Millionaire?.

Darren Windsor uses BBC Basic to code his SimplEPOS software for shop tills in more than 150 retail outlets across the UK. Windsor first came across BBC Basic when he was at school, and nearly 20 years later he's still coding away. "BBC Basic will quite happily run on anything. It's also quite robust - I've never had any reliability problems," he says.

Windsor says the interface on his software is kept deliberately simple, but despite this "you don't think to look at it that it's written in BBC Basic. The language has come a long way since back then [in the 1980s]." The only problem with BBC Basic is that you have to do all the programming work yourself. "Sometimes it would be nice to buy objects off the shelf - like a graphical form from another designer. With Visual Basic, you can drag and drop buttons on to forms, for example," he says.

So why hasn't Windsor taken the plunge and dumped BBC Basic for a more modern language like Visual Basic or C++?

"With some of them, there's such a big learning curve that it's quite hard work. BBC Basic is a very easy language to work with."

The fact that, 25 years on, some people still prefer to work with BBC Basic than vastly more powerful languages provides total vindication of the BBC's original decision to keep things as simple as possible. Never before had anyone decided to teach the general public how to program a computer and, given their now bewildering complexity, it seems unlikely anyone will ever do so again.

Author: Barry Collins