I think it commercialized programming. True democratization didn't really happen until Stallman, GCC, and the GPL.

It definitely democratized programming. There were a lot of us buying home computers and writing little programs that nobody ever saw. Nothing commercial ever came of the little utilities or games we made.

Before we got our home computer, the closest I ever got to a computer was reading about them in the encyclopedia.

What Stallman did a decade later was great if you happened to have access to the type of computer that could run Emacs. Even then, you probably didn't own the machine and maybe even had to pay for time on it by the hour. The small machines that ran Microsoft Basic were in people's homes.

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HankStallone 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, my Commodore 128 came with a 400-page system guide, nearly half of which was a BASIC reference and programming tutorial that explained concepts like looping and arrays. Those computers assumed you might want to program at least a little, and tried to make it easy to get started, so a lot of us did.

	▲	criddell 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		The original IBM PC came with a technical reference book that had full schematics and BIOS source code!

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fl7305 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> What Stallman did a decade later was great if you happened to have access to the type of computer that could run Emacs. Even then, you probably didn't own the machine and maybe even had to pay for time on it by the hour. The small machines that ran Microsoft Basic were in people's homes.

No, a decade later was at the end of the 1980's. At that time, many middle class families could afford home computers like the Atari ST, which could run many of the GNU compilers/tools.

It was a great learning experience porting Unix apps and games to the ST.

	▲	criddell 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Atari ST support wasn’t added to GNU C until 1993 with Multi TOS. It was largely the work of Eric Smith. You might be thinking of basic Motorola 68000 support which GNU C did have in the late 80’s but you couldn’t build a set of GNU tools that ran on the ST with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiNT

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PaulHoule 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

BASIC put programming in reach of a wide range of people. Steve Wozniak himself documented his personal progression from implementing a Breakout game with gates (see [1]) to implementing it in 6502 assembly to implementing it in BASIC [2]

You could have that BASIC experience on a minicomputer like the PDP-8, 11, or 20 which you might have at a high school or college earlier but with microcomputers you could have it in elementary school or at home.

[1] https://thedoteaters.com/?bitstory=bitstory-article-2/breako...

[2] http://blog.hardcoregaming101.net/2012/09/basic-history-of-b...