Trade Wars is a series of video games dating back to 1984. The video games are inspired by Hunt the Wumpus , the board game Risk , and the original space trader game Star Trader .
127-707: The first game with the title, Trade Wars , by Chris Sherrick, was developed in BASIC for the TRS-80 Model II , and soon ported, by Sherrick, to the IBM PC for the Nochange BBS system in 1984. Sherrick conceived his game as a cross between Dave Kaufman's BASIC program Star Trader (1974), the board game Risk , and Gregory Yob's Hunt the Wumpus (1972). Because Sherrick released his earliest versions with
254-583: A > . Such a collection of useful, related resources, interconnected via hypertext links is dubbed a web of information. Publication on the Internet created what Tim Berners-Lee first called the WorldWideWeb (in its original CamelCase , which was subsequently discarded) in November 1990. The hyperlink structure of the web is described by the webgraph : the nodes of the web graph correspond to
381-520: A home page containing a directory of the site web content . Some websites require user registration or subscription to access content. Examples of subscription websites include many business sites, news websites, academic journal websites, gaming websites, file-sharing websites, message boards , web-based email , social networking websites, websites providing real-time price quotations for different types of markets, as well as sites providing various other services. End users can access websites on
508-523: A sigil , and values are often identified as strings by being delimited by "double quotation marks". Arrays in BASIC could contain integers, floating point or string variables. Some dialects of BASIC supported matrices and matrix operations , which can be used to solve sets of simultaneous linear algebraic equations. These dialects would directly support matrix operations such as assignment, addition, multiplication (of compatible matrix types), and evaluation of
635-535: A visual forms builder . This reignited use of the language and "VB" remains a major programming language in the form of VB.NET , while a hobbyist scene for BASIC more broadly continues to exist. John G. Kemeny was the chairman of the Dartmouth College Mathematics Department. Based largely on his reputation as an innovator in math teaching, in 1959 the college won an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation award for $ 500,000 to build
762-494: A web application . Consequently, a static web page displays the same information for all users, from all contexts, subject to modern capabilities of a web server to negotiate content-type or language of the document where such versions are available and the server is configured to do so. A server-side dynamic web page is a web page whose construction is controlled by an application server processing server-side scripts. In server-side scripting, parameters determine how
889-588: A web page on the World Wide Web normally begins either by typing the URL of the page into a web browser or by following a hyperlink to that page or resource. The web browser then initiates a series of background communication messages to fetch and display the requested page. In the 1990s, using a browser to view web pages—and to move from one web page to another through hyperlinks—came to be known as 'browsing,' 'web surfing' (after channel surfing ), or 'navigating
1016-764: A $ 300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation , which was used to purchase a GE-225 computer for processing, and a Datanet-30 realtime processor to handle the Teletype Model 33 teleprinters used for input and output. A team of a dozen undergraduates worked on the project for about a year, writing both the DTSS system and the BASIC compiler. The first version BASIC language was released on 1 May 1964. Initially, BASIC concentrated on supporting straightforward mathematical work, with matrix arithmetic support from its initial implementation as
1143-677: A BASIC for the PDP-8 , which was a major success in the education market. By the early 1970s, FOCAL and JOSS had been forgotten and BASIC had become almost universal in the minicomputer market. DEC would go on to introduce their updated version, BASIC-PLUS , for use on the RSTS/E time-sharing operating system. During this period a number of simple text-based games were written in BASIC, most notably Mike Mayfield's Star Trek . David Ahl collected these, some ported from FOCAL, and published them in an educational newsletter he compiled. He later collected
1270-475: A batch language, and character string functionality being added by 1965. Usage in the university rapidly expanded, requiring the main CPU to be replaced by a GE-235, and still later by a GE-635. By the early 1970s there were hundreds of terminals connected to the machines at Dartmouth, some of them remotely. Wanting use of the language to become widespread, its designers made the compiler available free of charge. In
1397-546: A browser called WorldWideWeb (which became the name of the project and of the network) and an HTTP server running at CERN. As part of that development he defined the first version of the HTTP protocol, the basic URL syntax, and implicitly made HTML the primary document format. The technology was released outside CERN to other research institutions starting in January 1991, and then to the whole Internet on 23 August 1991. The Web
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#17327976132621524-466: A determinant. Many microcomputer BASICs did not support this data type; matrix operations were still possible, but had to be programmed explicitly on array elements. New BASIC programmers on a home computer might start with a simple program, perhaps using the language's PRINT statement to display a message on the screen; a well-known and often-replicated example is Kernighan and Ritchie 's "Hello, World!" program : An infinite loop could be used to fill
1651-480: A free license, many variations of the game appeared over the next few years, including TWV - Galactic Armageddon , Yankee Trader , and TW2 (a development of the original by John Morris who took over from Chris Sherrick). One of the more popular variants is the TradeWars 2002 series (Gary Martin, John Pritchett, 1986). TW2002 was designed originally as a WWIV chain (a way of calling external programs which
1778-625: A frenzy for the Web and started the dot-com bubble . Microsoft responded by developing its own browser, Internet Explorer , starting the browser wars . By bundling it with Windows, it became the dominant browser for 14 years. Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which created XML in 1996 and recommended replacing HTML with stricter XHTML . In the meantime, developers began exploiting an IE feature called XMLHttpRequest to make Ajax applications and launched
1905-515: A general purpose door library which allowed the game to be run under other brands of BBS software for the first time. TW2002 v1, v2, & v3 were BBS mainstays throughout the 1990s. In 1998, Gary Martin sold the Trade Wars license to John Pritchett, who had written Tradewars 2002 v3 and its gold expansion. John and his company, EIS, developed a stand-alone game server, TradeWars Game Server , which has allowed Trade Wars to survive beyond
2032-410: A loop: DO 100 , I = 1 , 10 , 2 . Is it '1, 10, 2' or '1, 2, 10', and is the comma after the line number required or not?" Moreover, the lack of any sort of immediate feedback was a key problem; the machines of the era used batch processing and took a long time to complete a run of a program. While Kurtz was visiting MIT , John McCarthy suggested that time-sharing offered a solution;
2159-458: A machine capable of running between 16 and 32 users at the same time. The system, bundled as the HP 2000, was the first mini platform to offer time-sharing and was an immediate runaway success, catapulting HP to become the third-largest vendor in the minicomputer space, behind DEC and Data General (DG). DEC, the leader in the minicomputer space since the mid-1960s, had initially ignored BASIC. This
2286-490: A network, a web browser can retrieve a web page from a remote web server . The web server may restrict access to a private network such as a corporate intranet. The web browser uses the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to make such requests to the web server . A static web page is delivered exactly as stored, as web content in the web server's file system . In contrast, a dynamic web page
2413-417: A new department building. Thomas E. Kurtz had joined the department in 1956, and from the 1960s Kemeny and Kurtz agreed on the need for programming literacy among students outside the traditional STEM fields. Kemeny later noted that "Our vision was that every student on campus should have access to a computer , and any faculty member should be able to use a computer in the classroom whenever appropriate. It
2540-433: A number of these into book form, 101 BASIC Computer Games , published in 1973. During the same period, Ahl was involved in the creation of a small computer for education use, an early personal computer . When management refused to support the concept, Ahl left DEC in 1974 to found the seminal computer magazine, Creative Computing . The book remained popular, and was re-published on several occasions. The introduction of
2667-627: A particular topic or purpose, ranging from entertainment and social networking to providing news and education. All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide Web, while private websites, such as a company's website for its employees, are typically a part of an intranet . Web pages, which are the building blocks of websites, are documents , typically composed in plain text interspersed with formatting instructions of Hypertext Markup Language ( HTML , XHTML ). They may incorporate elements from other websites with suitable markup anchors . Web pages are accessed and transported with
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#17327976132622794-401: A prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration", BASIC was one of the few languages that was both high-level enough to be usable by those without training and small enough to fit into the microcomputers of the day, making it the de facto standard programming language on early microcomputers. The first microcomputer version of BASIC
2921-472: A public Internet Protocol (IP) network, such as the Internet , or a private local area network (LAN), by referencing a uniform resource locator (URL) that identifies the site. Websites can have many functions and can be used in various fashions; a website can be a personal website , a corporate website for a company, a government website, an organization website, etc. Websites are typically dedicated to
3048-422: A range of devices, including desktop and laptop computers , tablet computers , smartphones and smart TVs . A web browser (commonly referred to as a browser ) is a software user agent for accessing information on the World Wide Web. To connect to a website's server and display its pages, a user needs to have a web browser program. This is the program that the user runs to download, format, and display
3175-463: A single machine could divide up its processing time among many users, giving them the illusion of having a (slow) computer to themselves. Small programs would return results in a few seconds. This led to increasing interest in a system using time-sharing and a new language specifically for use by non-STEM students. Kemeny wrote the first version of BASIC. The acronym BASIC comes from the name of an unpublished paper by Thomas Kurtz. The new language
3302-406: A smaller introductory version with the initial releases of the machines and a Microsoft-based version introduced as interest in the platforms increased. As new companies entered the field, additional versions were added that subtly changed the BASIC family. The Atari 8-bit computers use the 8 KB Atari BASIC which is not derived from Microsoft BASIC. Sinclair BASIC was introduced in 1980 with
3429-439: A translation that reflects the design concept and proliferation of the World Wide Web. Use of the www prefix has been declining, especially when web applications sought to brand their domain names and make them easily pronounceable. As the mobile Web grew in popularity, services like Gmail .com, Outlook.com , Myspace .com, Facebook .com and Twitter .com are most often mentioned without adding "www." (or, indeed, ".com") to
3556-562: A version of the MS code, or quickly introduced new models with it. Ohio Scientific's personal computers also joined this trend at that time. By 1978, MS BASIC was a de facto standard and practically every home computer of the 1980s included it in ROM . Upon boot, a BASIC interpreter in direct mode was presented. Commodore Business Machines includes Commodore BASIC , based on Microsoft BASIC. The Apple II and TRS-80 each have two versions of BASIC:
3683-429: A web browser in its address bar input field, some web browsers automatically try adding the prefix "www" to the beginning of it and possibly ".com", ".org" and ".net" at the end, depending on what might be missing. For example, entering "microsoft" may be transformed to http://www.microsoft.com/ and "openoffice" to http://www.openoffice.org . This feature started appearing in early versions of Firefox , when it still had
3810-429: A web page on the user's computer. In addition to allowing users to find, display, and move between web pages, a web browser will usually have features like keeping bookmarks, recording history, managing cookies (see below), and home pages and may have facilities for recording passwords for logging into web sites. The most popular browsers are Chrome , Firefox , Safari , Internet Explorer , and Edge . A Web server
3937-561: A wide variety of Tiny BASICs with added features or other improvements, with versions from Tom Pittman and Li-Chen Wang becoming particularly well known. Micro-Soft, by this time Microsoft , ported their interpreter for the MOS 6502 , which quickly become one of the most popular microprocessors of the 8-bit era. When new microcomputers began to appear, notably the "1977 trinity" of the TRS-80 , Commodore PET and Apple II , they either included
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4064-507: A year. Mosaic was a graphical browser that could display inline images and submit forms that were processed by the HTTPd server . Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark founded Netscape the following year and released the Navigator browser , which introduced Java and JavaScript to the Web. It quickly became the dominant browser. Netscape became a public company in 1995 which triggered
4191-424: Is a family of general-purpose , high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1963. They wanted to enable students in non-scientific fields to use computers. At the time, nearly all computers required writing custom software, which only scientists and mathematicians tended to learn. In addition to
4318-635: Is also run by many of the surviving BBSs, and variations have been ported to the web , cell phones , and the Palm OS . Computer Gaming World in 1993 rated Trade Wars two points out of three, stating that for many players "there is no other on-liner than Trade Wars ... This game will be around for a while, in one form or another". Trade Wars is cited as an influence by some game developers. Examples include Paul Sage, lead designer of Ultima Online , Josh Johnston, lead programmer of Jumpgate , and Eric Wang, producer of Earth & Beyond . In 2013,
4445-441: Is delivered with the page that can make additional HTTP requests to the server, either in response to user actions such as mouse movements or clicks, or based on elapsed time. The server's responses are used to modify the current page rather than creating a new page with each response, so the server needs only to provide limited, incremental information. Multiple Ajax requests can be handled at the same time, and users can interact with
4572-403: Is generated by a web application , usually driven by server-side software . Dynamic web pages are used when each user may require completely different information, for example, bank websites, web email etc. A static web page (sometimes called a flat page/stationary page ) is a web page that is delivered to the user exactly as stored, in contrast to dynamic web pages which are generated by
4699-450: Is not required by any technical or policy standard and many websites do not use it; the first web server was nxoc01.cern.ch . According to Paolo Palazzi, who worked at CERN along with Tim Berners-Lee, the popular use of www as subdomain was accidental; the World Wide Web project page was intended to be published at www.cern.ch while info.cern.ch was intended to be the CERN home page; however
4826-464: Is officially spelled as three separate words, each capitalised, with no intervening hyphens. Nonetheless, it is often called simply the Web , and also often the web ; see Capitalization of Internet for details. In Mandarin Chinese, World Wide Web is commonly translated via a phono-semantic matching to wàn wéi wǎng ( 万维网 ), which satisfies www and literally means "10,000-dimensional net",
4953-577: Is one of the languages that can be accessed by the 4Dos, 4NT, and Take Command enhanced shells. SaxBasic and WWB are also very similar to the Visual Basic line of Basic implementations. The pre-Office 97 macro language for Microsoft Word is known as WordBASIC . Excel 4 and 5 use Visual Basic itself as a macro language. Chipmunk Basic , an old-school interpreter similar to BASICs of the 1970s, is available for Linux , Microsoft Windows and macOS . The ubiquity of BASIC interpreters on personal computers
5080-533: Is the best known of such efforts. Many hostnames used for the World Wide Web begin with www because of the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts according to the services they provide. The hostname of a web server is often www , in the same way that it may be ftp for an FTP server , and news or nntp for a Usenet news server . These hostnames appear as Domain Name System (DNS) or subdomain names, as in www.example.com . The use of www
5207-407: Is the common practice of following such hyperlinks across multiple websites. Web applications are web pages that function as application software . The information in the Web is transferred across the Internet using HTTP. Multiple web resources with a common theme and usually a common domain name make up a website . A single web server may provide multiple websites, while some websites, especially
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5334-435: Is the standard markup language for creating web pages and web applications . With Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript , it forms a triad of cornerstone technologies for the World Wide Web. Web browsers receive HTML documents from a web server or from local storage and render the documents into multimedia web pages. HTML describes the structure of a web page semantically and originally included cues for
5461-496: Is very similar to VBA 6. The Host Explorer terminal emulator uses WWB as a macro language; or more recently the programme and the suite in which it is contained is programmable in an in-house Basic variant known as Hummingbird Basic. The VBScript variant is used for programming web content, Outlook 97, Internet Explorer, and the Windows Script Host. WSH also has a Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) engine installed as
5588-487: Is written for GW-BASIC, but will work in most versions of BASIC with minimal changes: The resulting dialog might resemble: World Wide Web The World Wide Web ( WWW or simply the Web ) is an information system that enables content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists. It allows documents and other web resources to be accessed over
5715-511: The Apple Macintosh , while yab is a version of yaBasic optimized for BeOS , ZETA and Haiku . These later variations introduced many extensions, such as improved string manipulation and graphics support, access to the file system and additional data types . More important were the facilities for structured programming , including additional control structures and proper subroutines supporting local variables . However, by
5842-481: The HP2000 series in the late 1960s and continuing sales into the 1980s. Many early video games trace their history to one of these versions of BASIC. The emergence of microcomputers in the mid-1970s led to the development of multiple BASIC dialects, including Microsoft BASIC in 1975. Due to the tiny main memory available on these machines, often 4 KB, a variety of Tiny BASIC dialects were also created. BASIC
5969-431: The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which may optionally employ encryption ( HTTP Secure , HTTPS) to provide security and privacy for the user. The user's application, often a web browser , renders the page content according to its HTML markup instructions onto a display terminal . Hyperlinking between web pages conveys to the reader the site structure and guides the navigation of the site, which often starts with
6096-536: The Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo DSi called Petit Computer allows for programming in a slightly modified version of BASIC with DS button support. A version has also been released for Nintendo Switch , which has also been supplied a version of the Fuze Code System, a BASIC variant first implemented as a custom Raspberry Pi machine. Previously BASIC was made available on consoles as Family BASIC (for
6223-536: The Nintendo Famicom ) and PSX Chipmunk Basic (for the original PlayStation ), while yabasic was ported to the PlayStation 2 and FreeBASIC to the original Xbox . Variants of BASIC are available on graphing and otherwise programmable calculators made by Texas Instruments ( TI-BASIC ), HP ( HP BASIC ), Casio ( Casio BASIC ), and others. QBasic , a version of Microsoft QuickBASIC without
6350-951: The QB64 and FreeBASIC implementations. In 2013 a game written in QBasic and compiled with QB64 for modern computers entitled Black Annex was released on Steam . Blitz Basic , Dark Basic , SdlBasic , Super Game System Basic , PlayBASIC , CoolBasic , AllegroBASIC , ethosBASIC , GLBasic and Basic4GL further filled this demand, right up to the modern RCBasic , NaaLaa , AppGameKit , Monkey 2 and Cerberus-X . In 1991, Microsoft introduced Visual Basic , an evolutionary development of QuickBASIC . It included constructs from that language such as block-structured control statements, parameterized subroutines and optional static typing as well as object-oriented constructs from other languages such as "With" and "For Each". The language retained some compatibility with its predecessors, such as
6477-716: The Web 2.0 revolution. Mozilla , Opera , and Apple rejected XHTML and created the WHATWG which developed HTML5 . In 2009, the W3C conceded and abandoned XHTML. In 2019, it ceded control of the HTML specification to the WHATWG. The World Wide Web has been central to the development of the Information Age and is the primary tool billions of people use to interact on the Internet . Tim Berners-Lee states that World Wide Web
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#17327976132626604-581: The web browsing history forward of the displayed page. Using Ajax technologies the end user gets one dynamic page managed as a single page in the web browser while the actual web content rendered on that page can vary. The Ajax engine sits only on the browser requesting parts of its DOM, the DOM, for its client, from an application server. Dynamic HTML, or DHTML, is the umbrella term for technologies and methods used to create web pages that are not static web pages , though it has fallen out of common use since
6731-491: The 1960s, software became a chargeable commodity; until then, it was provided without charge as a service with expensive computers, usually available only to lease. They also made it available to high schools in the Hanover, New Hampshire , area and regionally throughout New England on Teletype Model 33 and Model 35 teleprinter terminals connected to Dartmouth via dial-up phone lines, and they put considerable effort into promoting
6858-561: The BASIC language with a day of events on April 30, 2014. A short documentary film was produced for the event. Minimal versions of BASIC had only integer variables and one- or two-letter variable names, which minimized requirements of limited and expensive memory (RAM). More powerful versions had floating-point arithmetic, and variables could be labelled with names six or more characters long. There were some problems and restrictions in early implementations; for example, Applesoft BASIC allowed variable names to be several characters long, but only
6985-530: The BBS era. Though specifics vary between versions, in general the player is a trader in a galaxy with a fixed set of other players (either human or computer). The players seek to gain control of resources: usually fuel ore, food, and equipment, and travel through sectors of the galaxy trading them for money or undervalued resources. Players use their wealth to upgrade their spaceship with better weapons and defenses, and fight for control of planets and star bases. Since
7112-473: The DNS records were never switched, and the practice of prepending www to an institution's website domain name was subsequently copied. Many established websites still use the prefix, or they employ other subdomain names such as www2 , secure or en for special purposes. Many such web servers are set up so that both the main domain name (e.g., example.com) and the www subdomain (e.g., www.example.com) refer to
7239-508: The DO was instead indicated by the NEXT I . Likewise, the cryptic IF statement of Fortran, whose syntax matched a particular instruction of the machine on which it was originally written, became the simpler IF I = 5 THEN GOTO 100 . These changes made the language much less idiosyncratic while still having an overall structure and feel similar to the original FORTRAN. The project received
7366-497: The Dim keyword for declarations, "Gosub"/Return statements and optional line numbers which could be used to locate errors. An important driver for the development of Visual Basic was as the new macro language for Microsoft Excel , a spreadsheet program. To the surprise of many at Microsoft who still initially marketed it as a language for hobbyists, the language came into widespread use for small custom business applications shortly after
7493-455: The HTML and the CSS standards, has encouraged the use of CSS over explicit presentational HTML since 1997. Most web pages contain hyperlinks to other related pages and perhaps to downloadable files, source documents, definitions and other web resources. In the underlying HTML, a hyperlink looks like this: < a href = "http://example.org/home.html" > Example.org Homepage </
7620-423: The HTTP service so that the receiving host can distinguish an HTTP request from other network protocols it may be servicing. HTTP normally uses port number 80 and for HTTPS it normally uses port number 443 . The content of the HTTP request can be as simple as two lines of text: The computer receiving the HTTP request delivers it to web server software listening for requests on port 80. If the web server can fulfil
7747-449: The Internet according to specific rules of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN in 1989 and opened to the public in 1991. It was conceived as a "universal linked information system". Documents and other media content are made available to the network through web servers and can be accessed by programs such as web browsers . Servers and resources on
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#17327976132627874-411: The Internet. The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN . He was motivated by the problem of storing, updating, and finding documents and data files in that large and constantly changing organization, as well as distributing them to collaborators outside CERN. In his design, Berners-Lee dismissed the common tree structure approach, used for instance in
8001-642: The Sinclair ZX80 , and was later extended for the Sinclair ZX81 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum . The BBC published BBC BASIC , developed by Acorn Computers , incorporates extra structured programming keywords and floating-point features. As the popularity of BASIC grew in this period, computer magazines published complete source code in BASIC for video games, utilities, and other programs. Given BASIC's straightforward nature, it
8128-689: The Stardock where the players could buy new types of ships. Over a period of time, feature after feature was added, so that Trade Wars 2002 v0.96 was a different game than Trade Wars 2002 v1.00. TW2002 v1.00 was released in June 1991. One of the major design choices made was influenced by changes in the BBS software – WWIV author Wayne Bell had rewritten the WWIV BBS System using Turbo C instead of Turbo Pascal. This meant that classic Chain programs would no longer work, and Trade Wars 2002 v2 used
8255-512: The URLs of other resources such as images, other embedded media, scripts that affect page behaviour, and Cascading Style Sheets that affect page layout. The browser makes additional HTTP requests to the web server for these other Internet media types . As it receives their content from the web server, the browser progressively renders the page onto the screen as specified by its HTML and these additional resources. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
8382-451: The Web'. Early studies of this new behaviour investigated user patterns in using web browsers. One study, for example, found five user patterns: exploratory surfing, window surfing, evolved surfing, bounded navigation and targeted navigation. The following example demonstrates the functioning of a web browser when accessing a page at the URL http://example.org/home.html . The browser resolves
8509-675: The World Wide Web and web browsers . A web browser displays a web page on a monitor or mobile device . The term web page usually refers to what is visible, but may also refer to the contents of the computer file itself, which is usually a text file containing hypertext written in HTML or a comparable markup language . Typical web pages provide hypertext for browsing to other web pages via hyperlinks , often referred to as links . Web browsers will frequently have to access multiple web resource elements, such as reading style sheets , scripts , and images, while presenting each web page. On
8636-623: The World Wide Web are identified and located through character strings called uniform resource locators (URLs). The original and still very common document type is a web page formatted in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). This markup language supports plain text , images , embedded video and audio contents, and scripts (short programs) that implement complex user interaction. The HTML language also supports hyperlinks (embedded URLs) which provide immediate access to other web resources. Web navigation , or web surfing,
8763-543: The appearance of the document. HTML elements are the building blocks of HTML pages. With HTML constructs, images and other objects such as interactive forms may be embedded into the rendered page. HTML provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links , quotes and other items. HTML elements are delineated by tags , written using angle brackets . Tags such as < img /> and < input /> directly introduce content into
8890-403: The article prompted Microsoft to develop and release Small Basic ; it also inspired similar projects like Basic-256 and the web based Quite Basic. Dartmouth held a 50th anniversary celebration for BASIC on 1 May 2014. The pedagogical use of BASIC has been followed by other languages, such as Pascal , Java and particularly Python . Dartmouth College celebrated the 50th anniversary of
9017-452: The assembly of every new web page proceeds, including the setting up of more client-side processing. A client-side dynamic web page processes the web page using JavaScript running in the browser. JavaScript programs can interact with the document via Document Object Model , or DOM, to query page state and alter it. The same client-side techniques can then dynamically update or change the DOM in
9144-551: The basics of the game structure are numerical, these games are not reliant on high resolution graphics or rapid processing, which makes them ideally suited to low-resource computing platforms. Today, classic Trade Wars is primarily hosted by Windows NT/2000/XP computers running the Trade Wars Game Server (TWGS), which accepts incoming telnet connections and launches the Trade Wars ANSI game. Trade Wars
9271-461: The blink of an eye" even using a "slow" language, as long as large amounts of data were not involved. Many small business owners found they could create their own small, yet useful applications in a few evenings to meet their own specialized needs. Eventually, during the lengthy lifetime of VB3, knowledge of Visual Basic had become a marketable job skill. Microsoft also produced VBScript in 1996 and Visual Basic .NET in 2001. The latter has essentially
9398-515: The business-focused CP/M computers which soon became widespread in small business environments, Microsoft BASIC ( MBASIC ) was one of the leading applications. In 1978, David Lien published the first edition of The BASIC Handbook: An Encyclopedia of the BASIC Computer Language , documenting keywords across over 78 different computers. By 1981, the second edition documented keywords from over 250 different computers, showcasing
9525-440: The designers of Star Citizen listed Trade Wars 2002 among the games that inspired the design of their in-game economy. Games that are often compared to TradeWars include EVE Online , Starport , Jumpgate , Rebel Galaxy , Elite Dangerous , Earth and Beyond , Pardus , and Spore . Trade Wars 2002 was named the 10th best PC game of all time by PC World Magazine in 2009. A major online game based on Trade Wars 2002
9652-489: The display with the message: Note that the END statement is optional and has no action in most dialects of BASIC. It was not always included, as is the case in this example. This same program can be modified to print a fixed number of messages using the common FOR...NEXT statement: Most home computers BASIC versions, such as MSX BASIC and GW-BASIC , supported simple data types, loop cycles, and arrays. The following example
9779-669: The domain. In English, www is usually read as double-u double-u double-u . Some users pronounce it dub-dub-dub , particularly in New Zealand. Stephen Fry , in his "Podgrams" series of podcasts, pronounces it wuh wuh wuh . The English writer Douglas Adams once quipped in The Independent on Sunday (1999): "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for". The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used without much distinction. However,
9906-453: The emerging field quickly followed suit; Tymshare introduced SUPER BASIC in 1968, CompuServe had a version on the DEC-10 at their launch in 1969, and by the early 1970s BASIC was largely universal on general-purpose mainframe computers . Even IBM eventually joined the club with the introduction of VS-BASIC in 1973. Although time-sharing services with BASIC were successful for a time,
10033-564: The existing CERNDOC documentation system and in the Unix filesystem , as well as approaches that relied in tagging files with keywords , as in the VAX/NOTES system. Instead he adopted concepts he had put into practice with his private ENQUIRE system (1980) built at CERN. When he became aware of Ted Nelson 's hypertext model (1965), in which documents can be linked in unconstrained ways through hyperlinks associated with "hot spots" embedded in
10160-493: The explosive growth of the microcomputer era. When IBM was designing the IBM PC , they followed the paradigm of existing home computers in having a built-in BASIC interpreter. They sourced this from Microsoft – IBM Cassette BASIC – but Microsoft also produced several other versions of BASIC for MS-DOS / PC DOS including IBM Disk BASIC (BASIC D), IBM BASICA (BASIC A), GW-BASIC (a BASICA-compatible version that did not need IBM's ROM) and QBasic , all typically bundled with
10287-543: The final version 6.0 of the original Visual Basic ended on March 31, 2005, followed by extended support in March 2008. Owing to its persistent remaining popularity, third-party attempts to further support it exist. On February 2, 2017, Microsoft announced that development on VB.NET would no longer be in parallel with that of C#, and on March 11, 2020, it was announced that evolution of the VB.NET language had also concluded. Even so,
10414-406: The first microcomputers in the mid-1970s was the start of explosive growth for BASIC. It had the advantage that it was fairly well known to the young designers and computer hobbyists who took an interest in microcomputers, many of whom had seen BASIC on minis or mainframes. Despite Dijkstra 's famous judgement in 1975, "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had
10541-489: The first two were significant, thus it was possible to inadvertently write a program with variables "LOSS" and "LOAN", which would be treated as being the same; assigning a value to "LOAN" would silently overwrite the value intended as "LOSS". Keywords could not be used in variables in many early BASICs; "SCORE" would be interpreted as "SC" OR "E", where OR was a keyword. String variables are usually distinguished in many microcomputer dialects by having $ suffixed to their name as
10668-880: The language was still supported. Many other BASIC dialects have also sprung up since 1990, including the open source QB64 and FreeBASIC , inspired by QBasic, and the Visual Basic-styled RapidQ , HBasic , Basic For Qt and Gambas . Modern commercial incarnations include PureBasic , PowerBASIC , Xojo , Monkey X and True BASIC (the direct successor to Dartmouth BASIC from a company controlled by Kurtz). Several web-based simple BASIC interpreters also now exist, including Microsoft's Small Basic and Google 's wwwBASIC. A number of compilers also exist that convert BASIC into JavaScript . such as NS Basic . Building from earlier efforts such as Mobile Basic , many dialects are now available for smartphones and tablets. On game consoles, an application for
10795-505: The language. How to design and implement a stripped-down version of an interpreter for the BASIC language was covered in articles by Allison in the first three quarterly issues of the People's Computer Company newsletter published in 1975 and implementations with source code published in Dr. Dobb's Journal of Tiny BASIC Calisthenics & Orthodontia: Running Light Without Overbyte . This led to
10922-514: The language. In the following years, as other dialects of BASIC appeared, Kemeny and Kurtz's original BASIC dialect became known as Dartmouth BASIC . New Hampshire recognized the accomplishment in 2019 when it erected a highway historical marker in Hanover describing the creation of "the first user-friendly programming language". The emergence of BASIC took place as part of a wider movement toward time-sharing systems. First conceptualized during
11049-568: The late 1950s, the idea became so dominant in the computer industry by the early 1960s that its proponents were speaking of a future in which users would "buy time on the computer much the same way that the average household buys power and water from utility companies". General Electric, having worked on the Dartmouth project, wrote their own underlying operating system and launched an online time-sharing system known as Mark I. It featured BASIC as one of its primary selling points. Other companies in
11176-403: The latter half of the 1980s, users were increasingly using pre-made applications written by others rather than learning programming themselves; while professional programmers now had a wide range of more advanced languages available on small computers. C and later C++ became the languages of choice for professional "shrink wrap" application development. A niche that BASIC continued to fill
11303-534: The linker to make EXE files, is present in the Windows NT and DOS- Windows 95 streams of operating systems and can be obtained for more recent releases like Windows 7 which do not have them. Prior to DOS 5, the Basic interpreter was GW-Basic . QuickBasic is part of a series of three languages issued by Microsoft for the home and office power user and small-scale professional development; QuickC and QuickPascal are
11430-695: The machine. In addition they produced the Microsoft BASIC Compiler aimed at professional programmers. Turbo Pascal -publisher Borland published Turbo Basic 1.0 in 1985 (successor versions are still being marketed under the name PowerBASIC ). On Unix-like systems, specialized implementations were created such as XBasic and X11-Basic . XBasic was ported to Microsoft Windows as XBLite , and cross-platform variants such as SmallBasic , yabasic , Bywater BASIC , nuBasic , MyBasic , Logic Basic , Liberty BASIC , and wxBasic emerged. FutureBASIC and Chipmunk Basic meanwhile targeted
11557-433: The most popular ones, may be provided by multiple servers. Website content is provided by a myriad of companies, organizations, government agencies, and individual users ; and comprises an enormous amount of educational, entertainment, commercial, and government information. The Web has become the world's dominant information systems platform . It is the primary tool that billions of people worldwide use to interact with
11684-424: The new map data. High school student Dylan Tynan ("Sorcerer" and "Alex and Droogs"), worked with Mosley during the rewrite, serving as the primary tester, as well as contributing source fixes and additional features. After two years of development, Mosley released the source code for the game and editor, which allowed fellow WWIV sysop Gary Martin to make his own changes to the included source code. Gary's first version
11811-510: The new system to documents organized in other ways (such as traditional computer file systems or the Usenet ). Finally, he insisted that the system should be decentralized, without any central control or coordination over the creation of links. Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to CERN in May 1989, without giving the system a name. He got a working system implemented by the end of 1990, including
11938-585: The original 101 BASIC games converted into the Microsoft dialect and published it from Creative Computing as BASIC Computer Games . This book, and its sequels, provided hundreds of ready-to-go programs that could be easily converted to practically any BASIC-running platform. The book reached the stores in 1978, just as the home computer market was starting off, and it became the first million-selling computer book. Later packages, such as Learn to Program BASIC would also have gaming as an introductory focus. On
12065-446: The other two. For Windows 95 and 98, which do not have QBasic installed by default, they can be copied from the installation disc, which will have a set of directories for old and optional software; other missing commands like Exe2Bin and others are in these same directories. The various Microsoft, Lotus, and Corel office suites and related products are programmable with Visual Basic in one form or another, including LotusScript , which
12192-427: The page while data is retrieved. Web pages may also regularly poll the server to check whether new information is available. A website is a collection of related web resources including web pages , multimedia content, typically identified with a common domain name , and published on at least one web server . Notable examples are wikipedia .org, google .com, and amazon.com . A website may be accessible via
12319-485: The page. Other tags such as < p > surround and provide information about document text and may include other tags as sub-elements. Browsers do not display the HTML tags, but use them to interpret the content of the page. HTML can embed programs written in a scripting language such as JavaScript , which affects the behaviour and content of web pages. Inclusion of CSS defines the look and layout of content. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), maintainer of both
12446-542: The popularization of AJAX , a term which is now itself rarely used. Client-side-scripting, server-side scripting, or a combination of these make for the dynamic web experience in a browser. JavaScript is a scripting language that was initially developed in 1995 by Brendan Eich , then of Netscape , for use within web pages. The standardised version is ECMAScript . To make web pages more interactive, some web applications also use JavaScript techniques such as Ajax ( asynchronous JavaScript and XML ). Client-side script
12573-557: The programming language, Kemeny and Kurtz developed the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS), which allowed multiple users to edit and run BASIC programs simultaneously on remote terminals. This general model became popular on minicomputer systems like the PDP-11 and Data General Nova in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hewlett-Packard produced an entire computer line for this method of operation, introducing
12700-426: The release of VB version 3.0, which is widely considered the first relatively stable version. Microsoft also spun it off as Visual Basic for Applications and Embedded Visual Basic . While many advanced programmers still scoffed at its use, VB met the needs of small businesses efficiently as by that time, computers running Windows 3.1 had become fast enough that many business-related processes could be completed "in
12827-458: The request and response. The HTTP protocol is fundamental to the operation of the World Wide Web, and the added encryption layer in HTTPS is essential when browsers send or retrieve confidential data, such as passwords or banking information. Web browsers usually automatically prepend http:// to user-entered URIs, if omitted. A web page (also written as webpage ) is a document that is suitable for
12954-431: The request it sends an HTTP response back to the browser indicating success: followed by the content of the requested page. Hypertext Markup Language ( HTML ) for a basic web page might look like this: The web browser parses the HTML and interprets the markup ( < title > , < p > for paragraph, and such) that surrounds the words to format the text on the screen. Many web pages use HTML to reference
13081-440: The same power as C# and Java but with syntax that reflects the original Basic language, and also features some cross-platform capability through implementations such as Mono-Basic . The IDE , with its event-driven GUI builder , was also influential on other rapid application development tools, most notably Borland Software 's Delphi for Object Pascal and its own descendants such as Lazarus . Mainstream support for
13208-421: The same site; others require one form or the other, or they may map to different web sites. The use of a subdomain name is useful for load balancing incoming web traffic by creating a CNAME record that points to a cluster of web servers. Since, currently , only a subdomain can be used in a CNAME, the same result cannot be achieved by using the bare domain root. When a user submits an incomplete domain name to
13335-420: The same way. A dynamic web page is then reloaded by the user or by a computer program to change some variable content. The updating information could come from the server, or from changes made to that page's DOM. This may or may not truncate the browsing history or create a saved version to go back to, but a dynamic web page update using Ajax technologies will neither create a page to go back to nor truncate
13462-415: The server name of the URL ( example.org ) into an Internet Protocol address using the globally distributed Domain Name System (DNS). This lookup returns an IP address such as 203.0.113.4 or 2001:db8:2e::7334 . The browser then requests the resource by sending an HTTP request across the Internet to the computer at that address. It requests service from a specific TCP port number that is well known for
13589-625: The text, it helped to confirm the validity of his concept. The model was later popularized by Apple 's HyperCard system. Unlike Hypercard, Berners-Lee's new system from the outset was meant to support links between multiple databases on independent computers, and to allow simultaneous access by many users from any computer on the Internet. He also specified that the system should eventually handle other media besides text, such as graphics, speech, and video. Links could refer to mutable data files, or even fire up programs on their server computer. He also conceived "gateways" that would allow access through
13716-452: The third of the default engines along with VBScript, JScript, and the numerous proprietary or open source engines which can be installed like PerlScript , a couple of Rexx-based engines, Python, Ruby, Tcl, Delphi, XLNT, PHP, and others; meaning that the two versions of Basic can be used along with the other mentioned languages, as well as LotusScript, in a WSF file, through the component object model, and other WSH and VBA constructions. VBScript
13843-441: The two terms do not mean the same thing. The Internet is a global system of computer networks interconnected through telecommunications and optical networking . In contrast, the World Wide Web is a global collection of documents and other resources , linked by hyperlinks and URIs . Web resources are accessed using HTTP or HTTPS , which are application-level Internet protocols that use the Internet transport protocols. Viewing
13970-465: The web pages (or URLs) the directed edges between them to the hyperlinks. Over time, many web resources pointed to by hyperlinks disappear, relocate, or are replaced with different content. This makes hyperlinks obsolete, a phenomenon referred to in some circles as link rot, and the hyperlinks affected by it are often called "dead" links . The ephemeral nature of the Web has prompted many efforts to archive websites. The Internet Archive , active since 1996,
14097-412: The widespread success predicted earlier was not to be. The emergence of minicomputers during the same period, and especially low-cost microcomputers in the mid-1970s, allowed anyone to purchase and run their own systems rather than buy online time which was typically billed at dollars per minute. BASIC, by its very nature of being small, was naturally suited to porting to the minicomputer market, which
14224-417: The working title 'Firebird' in early 2003, from an earlier practice in browsers such as Lynx . It is reported that Microsoft was granted a US patent for the same idea in 2008, but only for mobile devices. The scheme specifiers http:// and https:// at the start of a web URI refer to Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP Secure , respectively. They specify the communication protocol to use for
14351-469: Was HP Time-Shared BASIC , which, like the original Dartmouth system, used two computers working together to implement a time-sharing system. The first, a low-end machine in the HP 2100 series, was used to control user input and save and load their programs to tape or disk. The other, a high-end version of the same underlying machine, ran the programs and generated output. For a cost of about $ 100,000, one could own
14478-462: Was Trade Wars 2001 , and it contained many of the base features. It also used exactly the same TWSECT.DAT file (the file which contains the information on all of the warp points in the game) as Trade Wars 2002 . While TW2001 was well received, Gary decided to expand the game further. In addition to the port in Sector 1 where the players could buy fighters/shields/holds, another port was added called
14605-514: Was a part of Turbo Pascal 3 - and one that often required the source code to work, which is why so many people were able to get copies) in September 1986 by a sysop named James T Gunderson with the handle "Lord Darkseid" (his BBS was called Apokolips, and he was apparently a DC Comics fan). Its original name was TW2 for WWIV - and it shared no source code with the Sherrick version, which
14732-407: Was a simple matter to type in the code from the magazine and execute the program. Different magazines were published featuring programs for specific computers, though some BASIC programs were considered universal and could be used in machines running any variant of BASIC (sometimes with minor adaptations). Many books of type-in programs were also available, and in particular, Ahl published versions of
14859-507: Was a success at CERN, and began to spread to other scientific and academic institutions. Within the next two years, there were 50 websites created . CERN made the Web protocol and code available royalty free in 1993, enabling its widespread use. After the NCSA released the Mosaic web browser later that year, the Web's popularity grew rapidly as thousands of websites sprang up in less than
14986-515: Was as simple as that." Kemeny and Kurtz had made two previous experiments with simplified languages, DARSIMCO (Dartmouth Simplified Code) and DOPE (Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment) . These did not progress past a single freshman class. New experiments using Fortran and ALGOL followed, but Kurtz concluded these languages were too tricky for what they desired. As Kurtz noted, Fortran had numerous oddly formed commands, notably an "almost impossible-to-memorize convention for specifying
15113-714: Was available for almost any system of the era, and became the de facto programming language for home computer systems that emerged in the late 1970s. These PCs almost always had a BASIC interpreter installed by default, often in the machine's firmware or sometimes on a ROM cartridge. BASIC declined in popularity in the 1990s, as more powerful microcomputers came to market and programming languages with advanced features (such as Pascal and C ) became tenable on such computers. By then, most nontechnical personal computer users relied on pre-written applications rather than writing their own programs. In 1991, Microsoft released Visual Basic , combining an updated version of BASIC with
15240-819: Was co-written by Bill Gates , Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff for their newly formed company, Micro-Soft. This was released by MITS in punch tape format for the Altair 8800 shortly after the machine itself, immediately cementing BASIC as the primary language of early microcomputers. Members of the Homebrew Computer Club began circulating copies of the program, causing Gates to write his Open Letter to Hobbyists , complaining about this early example of software piracy . Partially in response to Gates's letter, and partially to make an even smaller BASIC that would run usefully on 4 KB machines, Bob Albrecht urged Dennis Allison to write their own variation of
15367-542: Was due to their work with RAND Corporation , who had purchased a PDP-6 to run their JOSS language, which was conceptually very similar to BASIC. This led DEC to introduce a smaller, cleaned up version of JOSS known as FOCAL , which they heavily promoted in the late 1960s. However, with timesharing systems widely offering BASIC, and all of their competition in the minicomputer space doing the same, DEC's customers were clamoring for BASIC. After management repeatedly ignored their pleas, David H. Ahl took it upon himself to buy
15494-415: Was emerging at the same time as the time-sharing services. These machines had small main memory , perhaps as little as 4 KB in modern terminology, and lacked high-performance storage like hard drives that make compilers practical. On these systems, BASIC was normally implemented as an interpreter rather than a compiler due to its lower requirement for working memory. A particularly important example
15621-503: Was for hobbyist video game development , as game creation systems and readily available game engines were still in their infancy. The Atari ST had STOS BASIC while the Amiga had AMOS BASIC for this purpose. Microsoft first exhibited BASIC for game development with DONKEY.BAS for GW-BASIC , and later GORILLA.BAS and NIBBLES.BAS for QuickBASIC . QBasic maintained an active game development community, which helped later spawn
15748-419: Was heavily patterned on FORTRAN II; statements were one-to-a-line, numbers were used to indicate the target of loops and branches, and many of the commands were similar or identical to Fortran. However, the syntax was changed wherever it could be improved. For instance, the difficult to remember DO loop was replaced by the much easier to remember FOR I = 1 TO 10 STEP 2 , and the line number used in
15875-437: Was such that textbooks once included simple "Try It In BASIC" exercises that encouraged students to experiment with mathematical and computational concepts on classroom or home computers. Popular computer magazines of the day typically included type-in programs . Futurist and sci-fi writer David Brin mourned the loss of ubiquitous BASIC in a 2006 Salon article as have others who first used computers during this era. In turn,
16002-443: Was under development in the early 2000s under the name TW: Dark Millennium , later renamed Exarch . When the developer, Realm Interactive, was acquired by their publisher, NCsoft Austin ( Richard Garriott / Destination Games ), the development of Exarch was discontinued. What started as TW: DM was eventually released by NCsoft as Dungeon Runners . BASIC BASIC ( Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code )
16129-425: Was written in Basic. Another WWIV sysop - B0b "OM" Mosley - made additional modifications, including porting the code to Turbo Pascal 4.x specifications, numerous bug fixes , a series of cosmetic changes to allow the game to reflect a Star Trek theme, and development of a map editor that allowed for both larger maps and the ability to randomly generate new maps as well as reinitialize the game's databases to reflect
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