I was one of thousands of people, back in the 1980s, who thought that computing was some sort of black art. It just seemed so clever that one could enter letters or numbers, which were then manipulated by some sort of unseen thought process.
I found the whole idea fascinating and I wished that I had attended the sort of school progressive enough to teach computer programming, although I thought that it would take a much superior brain than mine, to make a computer do those amazing things.
At that time, I had a friend who was something of a whiz with computers, to the extent that he could decipher huge dumps of paper covered with nothing but ones and zeros, and he persuaded me that it wasn't too late to learn and that the whole process was really very logical and simple.
As a result of my friend's faith in my abilities, I signed up for an evening class in BASIC programming. BASIC is an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, which is a high level programming language. In other words, it uses English words to formulate its commands as well as strings and mathematical expressions, rather than binary machine code, as used in low-level languages.
With some trepidation, I set off to my first class. I expected to be surrounded by either very technical or very academic types, but it wasn't so. The class was a cross-section of about twenty people, men and women, young and not so young, mainly of the non-technical variety.
The lecturer made it all seem so simple. After all, the most important thing that BASIC requires is logic. IF, THEN, ELSE may sound complicated but it's just as it sounds: if a certain thing happens, then do one thing, but if not, do something else. For example:
IF A = B
THEN A = 0
ELSE B = 0
ENDIF
Having discovered that BASIC wasn't rocket science, I never looked back. In fact, I became so engrossed in my end of course project that I nearly forgot to do normal things like eating and sleeping.
Michael Russell |
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