I grew up in this era, owned a VIC-20, and it's simply not true that many people were doing anything useful with the rather awful BASIC dialects that shipped in microcomputers. They were just a pain to work with -- no real editor, etc and often missing the ability to even use the graphics etc functions of the computer they shipped on (esp on Commodore devices). Professional developers mostly wrote to assembly.
We did BASIC (& Logo) programming in my elementary school, on Apple IIs. It's rare anybody got past basic "hunt the wumpus" programs.
There were program listings for simple games in the back of computer magazines of the era. Invariably the better ones were full of DATA statements at the end that were bits of 6502 or Z80 machine code to do the "real" work. Woe befell you if you typed them in slightly wrong.
Later, mostly in the "16-bit" era, we got structured BASIC varieties with better/real editors, and that definitely changed things. I got a lot done in GFA Basic on my Atari ST. But it's debatable if GW-BASIC, GFA Basic, (and later Visual Basic) etc were "really" BASICs... they were more like ... permissive and weird Pascal.
We did BASIC (& Logo) programming in my elementary school, on Apple IIs. It's rare anybody got past basic "hunt the wumpus" programs.
There were program listings for simple games in the back of computer magazines of the era. Invariably the better ones were full of DATA statements at the end that were bits of 6502 or Z80 machine code to do the "real" work. Woe befell you if you typed them in slightly wrong.
Later, mostly in the "16-bit" era, we got structured BASIC varieties with better/real editors, and that definitely changed things. I got a lot done in GFA Basic on my Atari ST. But it's debatable if GW-BASIC, GFA Basic, (and later Visual Basic) etc were "really" BASICs... they were more like ... permissive and weird Pascal.