Help find an old children's book teaching BASIC programming with aliens

September 26, 2018 11:49 AM

Can you help identify this old children's book my boyfriend remembers reading in the 90s? He says it was a picture book about aliens who came out of a spaceship and programmed in BASIC.

My boyfriend remembers this book from his childhood and we're trying to find it.

He says that the book involved aliens coming out of a spaceship and he remembers it being heavy on pictures and light on words, and he doesn't think it had you actually writing your own program, just that the aliens used BASIC. He also says he thinks it was pitched for fairly young children. He would have read this book in Louisiana in the early 90s.

Any ideas? I've found a number of the collections of children's BASIC teaching books online but none of them quite seem to obviously match. (I already showed him the Usbourne SIMPLE BASIC book and he says it's not that.) Thanks!

posted by phoenixy to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

It sounds a lot like the Usborne books from the 1980s, which had aliens. (I know you said it isn't Simple BASIC but maybe one of the others?)
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:58 PM on September 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I sent my boyfriend links to several of the Usbourne books that match his descriptions. He says he's pretty sure it wasn't from Usbourne.
posted by phoenixy at 3:16 PM on September 26, 2018