Microsoft BASIC was developed from the project that led to the foundation of Micro-Soft, now known as Microsoft.
History[]
"Micro-Soft" was founded on April 4, 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to develop and sell a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800.[1] In October 1975, three variants of BASIC became available on paper tape or cassette tape for various memory configurations: 4K BASIC was $150, 8K BASIC was $200, and Extended BASIC was $350. Discounts were available for customers who also bought memory or an I/O board for the Altair computer.[2]
Dialects[]
In 1977, Microsoft adapted BASIC to run on the MOS Technology 6502 processor. It initially supported 6 digits of floating-point precision and was updated later that year to support 9 digits of precision with version 1.1.[3]
GW-BASIC is a dialect developed by Microsoft for the IBM Personal Computer. It was also bundled with MS-DOS, which became Microsoft's next primary product. The source code to GW-BASIC was published on February 10, 1983 and was released to the open source community on May 21, 2020.[4]
Variants and derivatives[]
- Altair BASIC (MITS Altair and other S-100 computers)
- AmigaBASIC (Commodore Amiga family)
- Applesoft BASIC (Apple II series)
- Atari Microsoft BASIC I and II (Atari 8-bit family)
- Basic 1.0 (Thomson computer family)
- BASICA ("BASIC Advanced") (PC DOS, on IBM PC)
- Color BASIC (TRS-80 Color Computer)
- Color BASIC and Disk Extended Color BASIC (TRS-80 Color Computer and Dragon 32/64)
- Commodore BASIC (Commodore 8-bit family, incl C64)
- FreeBASIC a free clone of the QuickBasic system
- Galaksija BASIC (Galaksija home computer)
- GambasTemplate:Snd free implementation inspired by Visual Basic
- GW-BASIC (BASICA for MS-DOS, on PC compatibles)
- HP2640 HP2647 Programmable Terminal with AGL graphics extensions
- IBM Cassette BASIC (Original IBM PC, built into ROM)
- Microsoft Level III BASIC (Tandy/Radio-Shack TRS-80)
- MBASIC (CP/M, on 8080, 8085, and Z80-based computers)
- MS BASIC for Macintosh (Mac OS on Apple Macintosh)
- MSX BASIC (MSX standard home computers)
- N88-BASIC (NEC PC8801/9801)
- N82-BASIC (NEC PC-8201/8201A, TRS-80 Model 100)
- Oric Extended Basic (Oric 8-bit family)[3]
- QBasic (PC DOS/MS-DOS on IBM PC and compatibles)
- QuickBASIC (PC MS-DOS on IBM PC and compatibles)
- Small Basic (MS Windows on IBM PC and compatibles)
- T-BASIC (Toshiba Pasopia) and T-BASIC7 (Toshiba Pasopia 7)
- TRS-80 Level II BASIC (Tandy/Radio-Shack TRS-80)
- Visual Basic (classic and .NET) (PC DOS/MS-DOS/MS Windows on IBM PC and compatibles)
- Video Technology Basic (Laser 350/500/700)
- WordBasic (pre-VBA) (MS Windows)
Gallery[]
References[]
- ↑ Bill Gates & Paul Allen Talk: Check out the ultimate buddy act in business history by Brent Schlender and Henry Goldblatt, CNN Money. 1995-10-02.
- ↑ File:Altair BASIC Paper Tape.jpg by Michael Holley, Wikimedia Commons. 2007-04-27.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Bill Gates’ Personal Easter Eggs in 8 Bit BASIC by Michael Steil, Pagetable. 2008-09-30
- ↑ Microsoft Open-Sources GW-BASIC by Rich Turner, Microsoft. 2020-05-21.
External links[]
- Microsoft / GW-BASIC at GitHub
- Microsoft BASIC version information at EMS Professional Software
- Microsoft BASIC at Wikipedia
Wikipedia (article: Microsoft BASIC )
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