1990: Programming languages

In 1990, I drew thirteen cartoons for the computing industry press. They were never published, so here they are from the Beholder archive. They have no particular artistic merit, but they’re mildly interesting from a nostalgically geeky point of view.

1. BASIC

Notes:
BASIC was my first experience of programming: I started on a UK101 plugged into the telly (and a cassette recorder too, of course). The BBC reference here is to the popular BBC micro that was widely adopted in schools (although the school I went to had Commodore PETs instead).

1. BASIC
2. Pascal
3. FORTRAN
4. COBOL
5. C
6. ADA
7. prolog
8. Algol
9. Object Oriented
10. Assembly code
11. Forth, Lisp & Snobol
12. 4th generation
13. Machine code

I named these verbose cartoons “the Need To Know Guide to Programming Languages”. Note that this was nothing to do with Danny O’Brien & Dave Green’s Need to Know (NTK) newsletter, which did not come along for another seven years (and to which I enthusiastically subscribed).

You’re free to use the illustration for anything provided you attribute Beholder as the source (a CC BY 4.0 license).

See more vintage Beholder nostalgia.