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Learn BASIC Now
''Learn BASIC Now'' is a book series written by Michael Halvorson and David Rygmyr, published by Microsoft Press. The primers introduced computer programming concepts to students and self-taught learners who were interested in creating games and application programs for early personal computers, including IBM-PC compatible systems and the Apple Macintosh. ''Learn BASIC Now'' included software disks containing the QuickBASIC, Microsoft QuickBASIC Interpreter and the book’s sample programs. The books were influential in the popularization of the BASIC language and released during a significant growth phase of the personal computer industry when the installed base of BASIC programmers hit four million active users. Since the books were distributed by Microsoft and featured a robust, menu-driven programming environment, ''Learn BASIC Now'' became an important catalyst for the learn-to-program movement, a broad-based computer literacy initiative in the 1980s and 1990s that encouraged ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael Halvorson
Michael James Halvorson (born 1 March 1963) is an American technology writer and historian. He was employed at Microsoft, Microsoft Corporation from 1985 to 1993 and contributed to the growth of the Microsoft Office and Visual Basic (classic), Microsoft Visual Basic software platforms. He is the author of 40 books related to computer programming, using PC software, and the history of innovation and technology. Early career Halvorson grew up in Olympia, Washington. He received a B.A. degree in Computer Science from Pacific Lutheran University (PLU) in 1985, and MA and Ph.D. degrees in History from the University of Washington (1996, 2001). In a recent book, he discusses the formative influence of the liberal arts on his approach to technical writing and software systems. In November 1985, Halvorson was hired as employee #850 at Microsoft in Bellevue, Washington, where he worked as a technical editor, acquisitions editor, and localization project manager. Halvorson was an influe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bob Albrecht
Bob Albrecht is a key figure in the early history of microcomputers. He was one of the founders of the People's Computer Company and its associated newsletters which turned into ''Dr. Dobb's Journal.'' He also brought the first Altair 8800 to the Homebrew Computer Club and was one of the main supporters of the effort to make Tiny BASIC a standard on many early machines. Albrecht has authored a number of books on BASIC and other computer topics. He is mentioned as one of the "who's who" in Steven Levy's '' Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution''. Career In 1955 Albrecht was studying for a master's degree when he quit for a job at the Minneapolis-Honeywell Aeronautical Division in Minneapolis, which had entered the computer market in April that year. He was working in a large room of engineers on flight control systems for high-speed jet aircraft using analog techniques. After a few months he was invited to join work on an IBM 650 drum computer, with the intention that he w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of the longest-running newspapers in the United States, the ''Times'' serves as one of the country's Newspaper of record, newspapers of record. , ''The New York Times'' had 9.13 million total and 8.83 million online subscribers, both by significant margins the List of newspapers in the United States, highest numbers for any newspaper in the United States; the total also included 296,330 print subscribers, making the ''Times'' the second-largest newspaper by print circulation in the United States, following ''The Wall Street Journal'', also based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' is published by the New York Times Company; since 1896, the company has been chaired by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, whose current chairman and the paper's publ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet editor developed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows, Windows, macOS, Android (operating system), Android, iOS and iPadOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro (computer science), macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Excel forms part of the Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Office suites of software and has been developed since 1985. Features Basic operation Microsoft Excel has the basic features of all spreadsheets, using a grid of ''cells'' arranged in numbered ''rows'' and letter-named ''columns'' to organize data manipulations like arithmetic operations. It has a battery of supplied functions to answer statistical, engineering, and financial needs. In addition, it can display data as line graphs, histograms and charts, and with a very limited three-dimensional graphical display. It allows sectioning of data to view its dependencies on various factors ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Visual Basic For Applications
Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is an implementation of Microsoft's event-driven programming language Visual Basic 6, Visual Basic 6.0 built into most desktop Microsoft Office applications. Although based on pre-.NET Visual Basic, which is no longer supported or updated by Microsoft (except under Microsoft's "It Just Works" support which is for the full lifetime of supported Windows versions, including Windows 10 and Windows 11), the VBA implementation in Office continues to be updated to support new Office features. VBA is used for professional and end-user development due to its perceived ease-of-use, Office's vast installed userbase, and extensive legacy in business. Visual Basic for Applications enables building user-defined functions (UDFs), automating processes and accessing Windows API and other low-level functionality through dynamic-link library, dynamic-link libraries (DLLs). It supersedes and expands on the abilities of earlier application-specific macro (computer sc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bill Gates
William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American businessman and philanthropist. A pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, he co-founded the software company Microsoft in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen. Following the company's 1986 initial public offering (IPO), Gates became a billionaire in 1987—then the youngest ever, at age 31. ''Forbes'' magazine The World's Billionaires, ranked him as the world's wealthiest person for 18 out of 24 years between 1995 and 2017, including 13 years consecutively from 1995 to 2007. He became the first centibillionaire in 1999, when his net worth briefly surpassed $100 billion. According to ''Forbes'', as of May 2025, his net worth stood at US$115.1 billion, making him the thirteenth-richest individual in the world. Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, Gates was privately educated at Lakeside School (Seattle), Lakeside School, where he befriended Allen and developed his computing interests ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
PowerBASIC
PowerBASIC, formerly Turbo Basic, is the brand of several commercial compilers by PowerBASIC Inc. that compile a dialect of the BASIC programming language. There are both MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows, Windows versions, and two kinds of the latter: Console and Windows. The MS-DOS version has a syntax similar to that of QBasic and QuickBASIC. The Windows versions use a BASIC syntax expanded to include many Windows functions, and the statements can be combined with calls to the Windows API. History The first version of the DOS compiler was published as BASIC/Z, the very first interactive compiler for CP/M and MDOS. Later it was extended to MS-DOS/PC DOS and in 1987 Borland distributed it as ''Turbo Basic''. ''Turbo Basic'' was originally created by Robert "Bob" Zale (1945–2012) and bought from him by Borland. When Borland decided to stop publishing it (1989), Zale bought it back from them, renamed it PowerBASIC and set up PowerBASIC Inc. to continue support and development o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
True BASIC
True BASIC is a variant of the BASIC programming language descended from Dartmouth BASIC — the original BASIC. Both were created by college professors John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz. History True BASIC traces its history to an offshoot of Dartmouth BASIC called Structured BASIC, or SBASIC for short. This was released sometime in 1975 or 1976, but was not installed as the mainline version of BASIC on the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS) that supported the campus. Shortly after, Kemeny became involved in an effort to produce an ANSI standard BASIC in an attempt to bring together the many small variations of the language that had developed through the late 1960s and early 1970s. This effort initially focused on a system known as Minimal BASIC that was similar to earliest versions of Dartmouth BASIC, while later work was aimed at a Full BASIC that was essentially SBASIC with various extensions. By the early 1980s, tens of millions of home computers were running s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Structured Programming
Structured programming is a programming paradigm aimed at improving the clarity, quality, and development time of a computer program by making specific disciplined use of the structured control flow constructs of selection ( if/then/else) and repetition ( while and for), block structures, and subroutines. It emerged in the late 1950s with the appearance of the ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60 programming languages, with the latter including support for block structures. Contributing factors to its popularity and widespread acceptance, at first in academia and later among practitioners, include the discovery of what is now known as the structured program theorem in 1966, and the publication of the influential " Go To Statement Considered Harmful" open letter in 1968 by Dutch computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra, who coined the term "structured programming". Structured programming is most frequently used with deviations that allow for clearer programs in some particular cases, such as whe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Integrated Development Environment
An integrated development environment (IDE) is a Application software, software application that provides comprehensive facilities for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source-code editor, build automation tools, and a debugger. Some IDEs, such as IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse (software), Eclipse and Lazarus (software), Lazarus contain the necessary compiler, interpreter (computing), interpreter or both; others, such as SharpDevelop and NetBeans, do not. The boundary between an IDE and other parts of the broader software development environment is not well-defined; sometimes a version control system or various tools to simplify the construction of a graphical user interface (GUI) are integrated. Many modern IDEs also have a class browser, an object browser, and a class diagram, class hierarchy diagram for use in object-oriented programming, object-oriented software development. Overview Integrated development environments are designed to maximize progra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Assembly Language
In computing, assembly language (alternatively assembler language or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence between the instructions in the language and the architecture's machine code instructions. Assembly language usually has one statement per machine instruction (1:1), but constants, comments, assembler directives, symbolic labels of, e.g., memory locations, registers, and macros are generally also supported. The first assembly code in which a language is used to represent machine code instructions is found in Kathleen and Andrew Donald Booth's 1947 work, ''Coding for A.R.C.''. Assembly code is converted into executable machine code by a utility program referred to as an '' assembler''. The term "assembler" is generally attributed to Wilkes, Wheeler and Gill in their 1951 book '' The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Dig ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
PC Magazine
''PC Magazine'' (shortened as ''PCMag'') is an American computer magazine published by Ziff Davis. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009. Publication of online editions started in late 1994 and continues . Overview ''PC Magazine'' provides reviews and previews of the latest hardware and software for the information technology professional. Other regular departments include columns by long-time editor-in-chief Michael J. Miller ("Forward Thinking"), Bill Machrone, and Jim Louderback, as well as: * "First Looks" (a collection of reviews of newly released products) * "Pipeline" (a collection of short articles and snippets on computer-industry developments) * "Solutions" (which includes various how-to articles) * "User-to-User" (a section in which the magazine's experts answer user-submitted questions) * "After Hours" (a section about various computer entertainment products; the designation "After Hours" is a legacy of the magazine's traditional orientation to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
