Applesoft BASIC

By Carl Gundel(Carl Gundel)
Before we started writing inventory management software I tried my hand at creating some graphics. The Apple II had hi-res graphics (for that day), and Applesoft had high level commands for drawing so you didn't need to POKE and PEEK as ...

So settling down to programming on the Apple II+, we had several books to help me with the process. Of course there was the standard green covered Applesoft book, and Mr. Alessi also has another book but I can't remember the title. I tried to find a shot of the book cover on Google but no luck.

Before we started writing inventory management software I tried my hand at creating some graphics. The Apple II had hi-res graphics (for that day), and Applesoft had high level commands for drawing so you didn't need to POKE and PEEK as much as in other BASICs. We had only a green phosphor monitor without color, but this was appropriate for business software development.

When editing a program in Applesoft BASIC, you could type some escape sequences to move the cursor around. If you moved the cursor up to the start of a line on the screen you could then reenter the line by moving the cursor to the right, and you could substitute some characters to change the line of code. This was crude compared to the way you did things on a VIC-20 where you just moved the cursor to the line you wanted to edit, changed just what was needed and hit Return.

Also, I had never written software before that used a floppy disk. This was another thing that I needed to become comfortable with. Our Apple II had 3 floppy drives, each was 143K. We also had a 16K card and a Z80 Softcard so the machine could run CP/M, but this was something we rarely did.