Basic BASIC (for Old School Computers) Quiz

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. To begin with, why was BASIC called BASIC?

Answer: It was an acronym

BASIC stood for "Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code." It was developed in 1963 at Dartmouth College, but really took hold with the home computer explosion of the late 1970s and early 1980s. One of the first versions of BASIC for a home computer was Altair BASIC, written in 1975 by a couple guys you may have heard of--Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the founders of Microsoft.

2. In most versions of BASIC, you could use a symbol as a shortcut for the PRINT command. What symbol would you use?

Answer: ?

This shortcut would save some small amount of time, since a large part of any program was indicating what would go onto the screen. Using a ? instead of typing PRINT may have saved only four keystrokes, but for some reason it seemed like so much more.

10 ? "Hello" would do the same as 10 PRINT "Hello".

3. If you wanted the program to pause for a few seconds, then continue (without you having to press any key or do anything else), which of the following one-line command sequences would you use?

Answer: 10 FOR X=1 TO 1000: NEXT X

10 FOR X=1 TO 1000: NEXT X means to have the computer count from 1 to 1000 to itself. In the older machines of the 80's, this would actually take a couple seconds.

In some machines, 10 A$=INKEY$: IF A$="" GOTO 10 was how you got the computer to pause until the user pressed any key ("Press any key to continue"). Other computers used a simpler GET A$ command.

WAIT 1000 and PAUSE 5 were simply nonsense commands that would do nothing more than throw an error message.

4. In BASIC, you had numeric variables and you had string variables. Numeric variables were numbers, plain and simply. LET X=45, for example. String variables were letters, numbers, symbols, phrases, etc. "This sentence could be contained in a string variable." What symbol after a letter signified a string variable?

Answer: $ (LET X$="Word")

The Dollar sign ($) signified a string variable.

In BASIC, the LET statement was actually optional. Rather than typing LET A=10, you could simply state A=10. Instead of saying LET X$="Hello", you could say X$="Hello".

5. 10 PRINT "What is the capital of Washington State?"; 20 INPUT A$ Which of the following lines WOULD NOT accomplish the same as the above (asking the user the capital of Washington State and waiting for a response)?

Answer: 10 PRINT "What is the capital of Washington State?"; A$

10 PRINT "What is the capital of Washington State?"; A$
would print the question and whatever A$ is at this time (probably nothing), but would never prompt for the question.

The other options would all print the question and wait for the user to give an answer. In most versions of BASIC, you could use the INPUT command in combination with a question rather than having to PRINT the question first, which made sense as virtually all INPUT commands would be in response to a question.

6. 10 PRINT "What is the capital of Washington State?"; 20 INPUT A$ 30 IF A$="Olympia" THEN GOTO 50 40 PRINT "Sorry, you're incorrect.": GOTO 60 50 PRINT "You're Right!" 60 PRINT "What is the largest city in Washington State?";: INPUT B$ Which of the following versions of line 30 will also work?

Answer: 30 IF A$="Olympia" THEN 50

In virtually all versions of BASIC, the word GOTO could be left out of an IF/THEN statement if the action was to send the program to a different line. This made sense, since that was the most common action of an IF/THEN statement.

30 A$="Olympia" THEN GOTO 50--The IF statement is missing. You would get an error message.

30 IF A$=Olympia THEN GOTO 50--No quotes around "Olympia", so BASIC will try to compare the string variable A$ with the numeric variable Olympia, and since you cannot compare a string variable with a numeric variable (does "Olympia" equal 2?), you would get an error message.

30 IF A$ "Olympia" THEN GOTO 50--No equals sign. You would get an error message.

7. Which aspect of BASIC was particularly frustrating to many computer users?

Answer: Different computers' versions used completely different commands for routine things

Different computers used different commands for many routine tasks. For example, to clear the screen on an Apple II, you typed HOME. On a TRS-80, you typed CLS. On a TI-99/4A, it was CALL CLEAR, and on an Atari 800, it was GRAPHICS 0.

Even on the same computer, there were sometimes incompatibilities. For example, a program written on TRS-80 Level I BASIC was incompatible with Level II BASIC, and likewise, Apple Integer BASIC and Applesoft BASIC were incompatible.

Many people learned how to use computers at school and at home, and frequently they had different kinds of machines at each place (an Apple II at school, and a much less expensive Atari 800 or Commodore 64 at home, for example). Programs written for one were not compatible with the other, even though 95% of the programming was the same.

8. In BASIC, you would use the GOSUB command to send the computer to a subroutine (a section of the program designed to perform a specific routine or task). What was the command used to send the program back from the subroutine?

Answer: RETURN

Subroutines would allow you to write programs within programs, then go to them from many different places. This would allow you to save time by not having to repeat yourself over and over. For example:

10 INPUT "What is the capital of Washington State?";A$
20 IF A$="Olympia" THEN GOSUB 100: GOTO 40
30 GOSUB 150
40 INPUT "What is the largest city in Washington State?"; B$
50 IF B$="Seattle" THEN GOSUB 100: GOTO 70
60 GOSUB 150
70 PRINT "Your Score Is";X: END
100 PRINT "Correct!": X=X+10: RETURN
150 PRINT "Incorrect.": X=X-5: RETURN

In this example, I have written a subroutine at line 100 for correct answers (print "Correct!", add 10 points to the score X, then return from the subroutine), and another at line 150 for the incorrect one (print "Incorrect", subtract 5 points from the score X, then return from the subroutine).

If, in line 20, the answer is correct, the program will go to the subroutine at line 100 and then, upon returning, will go to line 40. If the answer is not correct, it will skip the rest of line 20 and go straight to 30, which will then send the program to the subroutine at line 150.

RETURN sends the program back to the last GOSUB.

9. As you were working on your program, you would occasionally need to see what the program looked like. To review the program, line by line, you would type a command. What command would display all the lines of the program for your review?

Answer: LIST

LIST would list out all the lines of the program, usually at a speed that was far too fast to do anything with unless you were working with a very small program or printing out the list to a printer. On most computers, however, you could list certain line numbers by using a hyphen between them, as in LIST 100-1000 to list all lines between line 100 and line 1000.

10. Some, but not all versions of BASIC had a "Trace" feature which would display each line number of a program while the program was running so as to make it easier to debug. In most cases, the command used to turn on this feature was the title of a Disney movie character. What character name would turn on the trace feature?

Answer: TRON

TRON, from the Disney movie of the same name. Actually, TRON, in the BASIC programming language, stood for "Trace On", and to turn tracing off, of course, you would type TROFF.

Source: Author eauhomme

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor crisw before going online.
Any errors found in FunTrivia content are routinely corrected through our feedback system.

Before Mac and PC, before C++, before Turbo Pascal, we learned to program an Apple II, Commodore 64, Atari 800, TRS-80, or a TI-99/4A. Whatever machine we used, we worked in BASIC. What do you remember about the programming language of the 70s and 80s?

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