I took a compiler design class from the guy who invented Tiny Basic. I remember doing a few silly things in GW-BASIC, but almost all my programming at the time was being done in Fortran. You know, the language for engineers with real problems. 
Yeah, I did Fortran in college - using punch cards (c.1977). I played around with QuickBASIC quite a bit in the 90s, mostly writing astronomy programs. I still occasionally use one or two of those old programs (QuickBASIC runs in XP Mode). Today I can usually accomplish what I need to using Excel.
I also did a little bit of Fortran programming at school but by the 1980's I was right into Apple computers. All this talk of BASIC has reminded me of something that I was involved in during the 1980s, so with the indulgence of members, I would like to go off topic and tell a story...
In late 1986, I started writing a BASIC program for the Canterbury Astronomical Society (of which I was a member). It was for recording photometric data using a DOS 3.3 equipped Apple ][+, and it was based on an idea by Russell Genet, an astronomer well known at that time for his robot telescopes.
What we had was a Philips photomultiplier tube in a housing with a current to frequency converter (IF) at the Cassegrain focus of a 14½" telescope at West Melton, just outside Christchurch. The output of the IF was fed to a 6522 interface card (by John Bell manufacturing) plugged into peripheral slot 7. What this essentially did was to turn the Apple ][+ into a recording frequency counter. The signal would integrate for 700 milliseconds out of each second, and during the other 300 milliseconds the data, together with date and time data and UBV filter information, was dumped in the form of a hexadecimal 16 byte "word" into a dedicated section of the "massive" 32K RAM. This integration subroutine would loop a number of times (I can't remember how long for, but I think it was about five or ten minutes) then the whole section of filled RAM was dumped onto a 5¼ floppy disk, the RAM would be cleared and the whole process started again.
We started off our testing by gathering data for light curves for a couple well known variable stars; RR Centauri, a
W Ursae Majoris type star, a low-mass contact eclipsing binary, and RY Sagittarius, an
R Corona Borealis type intrinsic variable The the original plan when the system was up and running was to provide photometric data of variable stars for a couple of Physics students at Canterbury University, but that plan was about to change.
The night of February 24, 1987 is one I will never forget. There were two of us in the observatory. We had the 14½" Cassegrain on one of the two stars (I cant remember which) when the telephone rang. Graham answered it, and I could hear him getting excited as he wrote down what was obviously an RA & Dec. He said
"Cooky, we need to re-point the telescope. Some Chilean astronomers have discovered a supernova in the LMC." This was not as easy as it sounds. This telescope did not have setting circles. Pointing was achieved by pulling out the 1981 edition of Will Tirion's Sky Atlas 2000, and locating stars near where you wanted to point the telescope.
The problem we faced is that we were looking for a star field on the chart, trying to match it with what we could see through the finder telescope (a 4" refractor attached to the side of the big one), and trying to identify a star in the field of view that wasn't on the star chart. Initially, this did not seem as if it would be easy. Tirion's Sky Atlas goes down to +8 mag, but the 4" refractor shows down to at least +13. That means there were literally hundreds of stars in the field that were not on the chart. However, it didn't take us long to find it, there was this 3rd - 4th magnitude in the field where there was none on the chart among a group of about five stars which were. We were gathering photometric data on SN1987a within about 40 minutes of the phone call.
That pattern of half a dozen stars was going to become very familiar for the next few months.
