It definitely democratized programming. There were a lot of us buying home computers and writing little programs that nobody ever saw. Nothing commercial ever came of the little utilities or games we made.
Before we got our home computer, the closest I ever got to a computer was reading about them in the encyclopedia.
What Stallman did a decade later was great if you happened to have access to the type of computer that could run Emacs. Even then, you probably didn't own the machine and maybe even had to pay for time on it by the hour. The small machines that ran Microsoft Basic were in people's homes.
Yeah, my Commodore 128 came with a 400-page system guide, nearly half of which was a BASIC reference and programming tutorial that explained concepts like looping and arrays. Those computers assumed you might want to program at least a little, and tried to make it easy to get started, so a lot of us did.
> What Stallman did a decade later was great if you happened to have access to the type of computer that could run Emacs. Even then, you probably didn't own the machine and maybe even had to pay for time on it by the hour. The small machines that ran Microsoft Basic were in people's homes.
No, a decade later was at the end of the 1980's. At that time, many middle class families could afford home computers like the Atari ST, which could run many of the GNU compilers/tools.
It was a great learning experience porting Unix apps and games to the ST.
Atari ST support wasn’t added to GNU C until 1993 with Multi TOS. It was largely the work of Eric Smith.
You might be thinking of basic Motorola 68000 support which GNU C did have in the late 80’s but you couldn’t build a set of GNU tools that ran on the ST with it.
You might be right that it wasn't GCC specifically. I think I was running a free/low cost version of OS-9 68K for the Atari ST, and managed to get hold of a proprietary C compiler for it. The combination of a "real" OS + C compiler made it possible to port the popular Unix text games of the time (empire, nethack, larn, etc).
My point was more that the 68K home computers like Atari ST and the Amiga of the mid-to-late 1980s were powerful enough to "run emacs / C compilers", even if it wasn't the GNU stuff yet.
BASIC put programming in reach of a wide range of people. Steve Wozniak himself documented his personal progression from implementing a Breakout game with gates (see [1]) to implementing it in 6502 assembly to implementing it in BASIC [2]
You could have that BASIC experience on a minicomputer like the PDP-8, 11, or 20 which you might have at a high school or college earlier but with microcomputers you could have it in elementary school or at home.
Kemeny and Kurtz's BASIC was an ahead-of-time compiled language which ran on time-shared machines; mainframes at first then smaller "mini"-computers. The typical interpreted BASIC for microcomputers was quite a bit simpler than that.
