Darxus

Tron

darxus

3/13/11 12:30 am

"Control. Order. Perfection. None of it meant a thing."
"Chaos. Good news."

- Flynn

When I got hooked on computers long ago, "TRON" was one of the words staring back at me, in the editor of the BASIC programming language:


This is what the first computers I had access to booted into.

TRON stands for TRace ON, and is used for debugging - figuring out what's wrong with a program.

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• temalyen

  3/13/11 06:25 am (UTC)

  

  I remember repeatedly pressing TRON as a kid expecting something related to the movie to happen. (I was 9. I was dumb.)
  
  And you had an IBM that booted into BASIC? Why would anyone have wanted that? It wasn't a Commodore. (Or any of the other numerous computers whose OS was more or less BASIC.) I used to be all about programming in Basic from the mid 80s to early 90s, though I always used QuickBASIC. I couldn't stand BASIC/BASICA/GW-BASIC.
  
  Err, yeah... sort of off topic there.

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  • darxus

    3/13/11 06:53 am (UTC)

    

    On the computers in the labs where my mom went to college.
    
    The IBMs had BASIC on ROMs, and loaded it if they had nothing else to boot (no hard drives).
    
    My dad getting a Tandy that came with a BASIC programming book... affected me. I wanted a compiler so bad for years, and it never occurred to me to ask somebody to buy me one instead of another game.
    
    Have you looked into Google's Go programming language?

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    • temalyen

      3/13/11 07:11 am (UTC)

      

      Oh yes, I completely forgot that the old IBM machines had the language in ROM. I was thinking it was a really odd autoexec.bat setup or something.
      
      I know Go exists, but I don't really know anything about it. It's been years and years since I've programmed seriously. Maybe I'll look into it just to see what it's all about, though.

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