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Microsoft BASIC

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Altair 8K BASIC paper tape

Original paper tape of 8K BASIC for the Altair 8800 at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science

Microsoft BASIC is the software product that led to the founding of Microsoft. It was a line of BASIC interpreters and compilers adapted for many different microcomputers.

It first appeared in 1975 as Altair BASIC, which was the first version of BASIC published by Microsoft as well as the first high-level programming language available for the Altair 8800 microcomputer.

During the home computer craze of the late-1970s and early-1980s, Microsoft BASIC was ported to and supplied with many home computer designs. Slight variations to add support for machine-specific functions, especially graphics, led to a profusion of related designs like Commodore BASIC and Atari Microsoft BASIC.

As the early home computers gave way to newer designs like the IBM Personal Computer and the Macintosh, BASIC was no longer as widely used, though it retained a strong following. The release of Visual Basic rebooted its popularity, and it remains in wide use on Windows platforms in its most recent incarnation, Visual Basic .NET.

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[]

  1. ↑ 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.
  2. ↑ File:Altair BASIC Paper Tape.jpg by Michael Holley, Wikimedia Commons. 2007-04-27.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Bill Gates’ Personal Easter Eggs in 8 Bit BASIC by Michael Steil, Pagetable. 2008-09-30
  4. ↑ Microsoft Open-Sources GW-BASIC by Rich Turner, Microsoft. 2020-05-21.

External links[]
Wikipedia (article: Microsoft BASIC )
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