If the world is round, then the technology world is also rounded. In the late seventies and eighties, the BASIC language and Assembly Language were hot things at the time. After that, people took on new technologies with the Internet and jumped on languages such as HTML, C, C++, Perl, Python, and JavaScript. Systems moved from 8bit to 64bit. Storage devices moved from cassette tape to the cloud. Typing a program onto the computer moved from copying lines of code from computer magazines onto the computer screen. Issuing the BASIC RUN command and witnessing the execution of the programs felt magic at the time. For those who didn’t live the 8-bit era, the same feeling can be felt today when running a Docker script and witnessing your code and servers coming to life. 8-bit programmers became the old school, while modern-day software engineers and data scientists became the new school. If you ask a Generation Z programmer what Assembly Language is or what BASIC is, they may need to learn. But the wonders of the seventies and eighties seem to be returning.

The eighties are returning, and I feel I am that child nerd again. The Commodore 64 is now a C64 Mini, and the Sinclair Spectrum is ZX Spectrum Next. I still play old 8-bit games using emulators. You can also watch or listen to many new retro computing episodes via podcasts or Netflix. I started watching “War Games The Movie” for the millionth time just yesterday.

BASIC and Assembly language are hot again. Assembly language made it to the top 15 languages according to TIOBE Index. Not long ago, I met a young person buying an assembly language book at HalfPrice book store. When I asked why he bought the book, he answered, “I heard that is cool.” And today, I just saw that Google published WWWBasic, an implementation of BASIC that runs via JavaScript. You can do the following:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<script src="https://google.github.io/wwwbasic/wwwbasic.js"></script>
<script type= "text/basic">
PRINT "Hello World!"
FOR i = 1 to 10
PRINT "Counting "; i
NEXT i
</script>

You can also import BASIC code as a Node.js module.

The world is round, and the technology world is round, too.