We had a room full of networked BBC model B's when i was at school, I coded a rather cool little routine that I could send over the network to any other computer on it and it would hack the graphics output and make all the words on screen turn into square blocks and drop down and pile up at the bottom. I got made into a systems admin after that and had to monitor lunchtime usage and do the friday system backup on the big harddrive
As for my BASIC and general coding experience,
Vic20 with commodore basic, made alsorts of stuff with it.
BBC Basic and Asm. Was mostly for school stuff.
Amiga, used everything from AMOS to BlitzBasic 2, made several little games and stuff with those, also tried my hand at C and Asm but never got far. Coded my A level computer project in AMOS, a paint package like Dpaint.
PC, Used Div Games Studio and made a clone of Fatal Fury. Did a few things in Darkbasic but found it slow. Switched to blitzbasic (2d) when i found it in a shop, converted a couple old amiga listings to it then went on to code afew games and demos in it, also got blitz3d and did a few things in that. More recently got blitzmax and have coded alsorts of little projects in it and am currently using it for opengl stuff.
Also on the PC I have coded some things in C tho nothing with graphics as such, have coded a few things in c++ including some opengl stuff and a limited attempt at DX back in the DX7 era. Also had a mess about with c# but havent really dug into it as I spend most of my time coding in bmax nowadays.
I have messed around abit with glsl shaders following some guides, havent coded my own entire complex vert or pixel shader yet but have edited others and had some success.
I have tried alot of basic's on PC and there are some very good ones, Purebasic seems pretty good tho it tends to be used more for apps. Ibasic/ebasic do there thing well enough but arent as good as purebasic,blitz or even dbpro imho. Freebasic is probably the best freeware one I have used and stands up well againt several paid basic's.
Myself I am happy with blitzmax, it's a very capable language which can be used much like the older blitzbasic's but if you dig in and start to use the OOP side of it you realize just how good a language it is. Plus it's very extendable with various modules and if you know what your doing you can use C and C++ code should you feel the need. Also all the default modules that come with the language have full source code so you can even edit and extend them if you wish to, there also a great source for learning more about the language itself.
