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The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

#171

Post by sradman »

copperx wrote: post #22
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #17

From a comment in the source > ORIGINALLY WRITTEN ON THE PDP-10 FROM FEBRUARY 9 TO APRIL 9 1975 Wow! I did not realize that it was written so quickly. Two months that literally changed the PC landscape forever.

It's funny how stuff that got put together quickly like GW-BASIC and JavaScript got so much success because of luck and popular appeal. It's like music. The best music has never been in the top of the charts. The best movies have never won Oscars. This is pop computing.

I think they were riding a wave as it was beginning to form; the microprocessor wave. It was very much part of a place in time but they made some exceptional choices given that context. I don’t think that their success was due to luck or popular appeal, it was due to vision and the ability to execute on that vision.

Re: The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

#173

Post by iforgotpassword »

So this is the initial version that might still contain some bugs?

I forgot the details, but I remember that my XT clone had does MSDOS 2.11 and whatever version of gwbasic came with that, and MUSIC.BAS would always play the notes slightly out of sync with the visuals, and the prompt would return before the last note played.

Some day I saw it running on a friends machine, and there everything looked fine. I copied his gwbasic.exe and lo and behold, now it worked on my machine too. The version numbers were also different, but I couldn't tell you either one now.

Re: The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

#174

Post by brianmcc »

cachestash wrote: post #127

My first foray into BASIC was BBC BASIC. I was an 11 year old in the eighties and attending comprehensive secondary school in the UK. We had a school 'computer room' which hosted ten BBC Micros. The mathematics teacher at the time ran an after school computer club and it was alleged that the last 30 minutes were unstructured and some students had managed to get a cassette tape copy of Elite (now Elite Dangerous) load…

My own story is not dissimilar :-)

Re: The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

#175

Post by kriro »

linguae wrote: post #56

The funny thing about this announcement is that a week ago I just found my old QBASIC textbook that I learned how to program with back in 1998. QBASIC was my very first programming language; I was a nine year old kid who loved computers and would read anything computer-related that was available, including my mom's textbooks (she was returning to college at the time and took some courses on computing and applications…

I also started with QBasic (with no internet connection). Built a small choose your own adventure. Then I wanted to build a "password program" that would ask for a password before you could get "into the computer". I heard somewhere (schooljard) that you can put so called exe files into a file called autoexec.bat and they would start first. Alas QBasic could not build these magical files. I wnt to a store that had computer books and software in their music CD section and saw a huge Turbo Pascal book. It came with a floppy disk that had Turbo Pascal on it and 12 year old me was sitting on the floor of this store in front of the pop music CDs of the day and leafing through the book to see if you could build exe files :P

Lots of begging parents later I owned the book, struggled through it and build some small things. The interesting thing is I never programmed that much but was always fascinated by what amazing things existed. I guess I mostly liked reading about technology and using it a bit. I then mostly went through a phase of playing games on the family computer, completely destroying it when I tried to install Suse-Linux from a CD from some magazine (I was still very young and didn't fully understand what an operating system even is but the article made it sound very cool). My next phase of interest was when I discovered the Llama book and O'Reilly books in general. Programmed some Perl, picked up some other languages but never really build anything worth noting. And then the last experimental phase was when I stumbled upon "Smashing the stack for fun and profit" and into the huge field of computer security. Went through a lot of "crack mes" etc. and just had a fun time. After that I started to understand how things worked a little more and went about it in a more structured way that eventually lead to a CS-ish degree. But I still have the fondest memories of the time when I basically knew nothing and was just fiddling around and then pooof sometimes cool stuff happened, sometimes stuff broke :P

So yeah tl;dr...if it wasn't for stumbling onto Basic some day I might have never gotten interested in anything related to computers.

Re: The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

#176

Post by C1sc0cat »

pan69 wrote: post #99
perl4ever wrote: post #92

I wasn't particularly aware of it, but it looks like the TRS-80 BASIC that introduced me to programming was also probably developed by Microsoft, and I'm pretty sure that AmigaBASIC was as well. I think I also used QuickBASIC on the Mac a little, but what I particularly remember was a demo for it that visually showed different sorting algorithms, that inspired me to do something similar in Pascal.

Microsoft BASIC was all over the place in the late 70's and early 80's. Before MS-DOS, Microsoft was basically a programming languages company (and they still are today). They licensed their BASIC to many other companies, even Apple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BASIC

And I think most if not all MSBASIC ports for early PC's had a memory leak if you did not break out a FOR loop in the right way.

I am a bit rusty but this sows the problem:

10 L = 4720 FOR I =1 TO 1000 STEP 2

30 PRINT I%

35 IF I = l GOTO 6999

40 NEXT

6999 STOP

What you needed to do was set I to the end condition as part of the break out of the loop.

There was also a lot of aggressive compression done to reduce program size PET in particular munged every thing up putting as many statements on one line as possible

Re: The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

#177

Post by pknerd »

cachvico wrote: post #110
pknerd wrote: post #24

GWBasic was good resource to get into programming world during my teenage. Now I want to teach coding to my 10 years old son. Will you still recommend GWBASIC/Quick basic or Python or other languages for kids?

Check out Scratch, from MIT. https://scratch.mit.edu/

I know about Scratch. The only issue I have that real-world programming environment is different than Scratch one.

Re: The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

#178

Post by pknerd »

adzm wrote: post #31
pknerd wrote: post #24

GWBasic was good resource to get into programming world during my teenage. Now I want to teach coding to my 10 years old son. Will you still recommend GWBASIC/Quick basic or Python or other languages for kids?

JavaScript since they can make web pages that do things in browsers they are familiar with, which is a huge motivation. Lua so they can mess with Roblox scripting. Then C# mostly for the dev environment And strong types, and Python for the expressiveness. In my humble opinion and experience at least. It's almost always most important to start with something that will augment what they are already interested in.

I personally don't like JS, how can I teach him? Plus working on JS involves many things for a beginner, you know HTML, you know a bit CSS too.

Re: The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

#179

Post by pknerd »

pknerd wrote: post #24

GWBasic was good resource to get into programming world during my teenage. Now I want to teach coding to my 10 years old son. Will you still recommend GWBASIC/Quick basic or Python or other languages for kids?

BTW, Paul Graham (pg) using online Repl to teach GWBasic to his son.

Re: The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

#180

Post by pmyteh »

igravious wrote: post #156
weq wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Borrowed mine from the library at age 13 (`98) when i got a hand-me-down Apricot from a friend. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_Computers

Just realised we have Apple computers, Apricot computers, Blackberry phones, Raspberry (Pi) computers – is there some kind of fruit obsession in IT I've missed out on?

Tangerine computers too, back in the day, Acorn (technically a fruit)...
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