I’m MajorHavoc. I’m a bit too open with my opinions here to share my real name.

I manage and mentor programmers for a living.

I’m proficient in dozens of programming languages, but my first programming language was Commodore BASIC.

Today, I still code in variations of BASIC for fun and nostalgia.

I am michael calkins, male, born in 1986 in texas, usa.

I was active on the network54 qbasic forum community starting around 2005. Network54 eventually got taken over by tapatalk, which made the forums effectively unusable. At least the content is still there, as an archive, though searching it is difficult, even if you know what you are looking for.

I joined galleon’s qb64.net forums in 2008, though i didn’t become active there until about 2011. Unfortunately those forums seem to have died horribly. If anyone has a comprehensive backup of them, i’d be very interested in it. I wrote the first qb64 debugger, posted it to those forums, and demonstrated it on youtube. (I still have the code somewhere locked in my ministorage, but it is inaccessible for the forseeable future.)

I also dabbled in various other qbasic forums. I was active on mark wilhelm’s qbasic.com forums, but they died. I briefly visited petesqbsite. I joined the qb64.org forums in 2018, and briefly posted in 2020, but those forums also seem to have disappeared.

The remnants of the old community seem to be at qb64phoenix.com/forum currently.

I grew up with ms-dos 5 and 6.22, windows 3.1x, 95b, and 98se. Later, i used windows 2000 and xp, and worked with vista and 7. I despise windows 8.x. I use windows 10 when i have to. Lately, i’ve been playing with windows 98se and 2000 within 86box, on windows 10 hosts.

I’m self-taught in programming with qbasic, c and c++ (mostly in c style), and x86 assembly (both 16 and 32 bit). I have some experience programming for both 16 bit dos and 32 bit windows.

I’ve tried messing with linux and bsd at various points, but have never gotten comfortable with them.

From 2020 thru 2024, i was “u/exjwpornaddict” on reddit, and did occassionaly check in at r/qbasic. But i was permanently banned from reddit about a month ago. Thus, i am trying to switch to lemmy, but it has been rough so far. There didn’t seem to be any existing basic programming community here, so i created one. I’m surprised to see that there are already 35 subscribers. So, please, introduce yourselves.

Back in the day, there was a rivalry between the qbasic (at least at network54) and freebasic communities. I’m hoping we’re past that now (or at least the hostile aspects of the rivalry). I haven’t followed freebasic. For that matter, i haven’t really been following recent qb64 developments either. If i use basic at all, nowadays, it is qbasic 1.1 inside dosbox. But i think gwbasic (though gwbasic seems tedious and archaic to me), qbasic, and qb64 are similar enough to share a community. I assume freebasic is also. I don’t know about visual basic. I suspect it would do better with it’s own community. I think vb has some merit up to 6, but i despise everything .net.