Re: The russians using pencils in space
This whole story is bullshit.
Well, bullshit is a bit harsh, but I believe the story to be apocryphal. The graphite powder released when you use a pencil turns out to not be great news for circuit boards and computers in a confined space without gravity. Perhaps lead pencils don't powder so easily, but I've never knowingly used one of those so I'm unsure.
Regarding BASIC, I recently downloaded
Brandy since it's able to load tokenised BBC BASIC programmes, and I could validate my
BBC Micro disc unpacker. It's quite neat, but doesn't support the graphics primitives on anything but RISC OS.
I found the Python tutorial to be very reminiscent of old 'Learn BASIC' books, but it does lack the graphics and sound primitives that were such immediate payback when messing about as a youngster.
Actually RISC OS using real BBC BASIC might not be a bad place to start. It's probably the last actively maintained microcomputer OS (possibly Haiku is also there), and eminently hackable, and runs rather smartly on a Raspberry Pi or even a Pandora apparently. There's no circle command in BBC BASIC, so that was my first introduction to trigonometric functions (you can also do it using Pythagoras' theorem):
10 CENTREX=640
20 CENTREY=512
30 RADIUS=200
40 MOVE CENTREX, CENTREY+RADIUS
50 FOR A=0 to 3.14159 STEP 0.1
60 DRAW CENTREX+RADIUS*SIN(A), CENTREY+RADIUS*COS(A)
70 NEXT
(code untested)