Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

#21

Post by gwbas1c » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 2:22 PM UTC

For awhile googling for GWBasic would find my homepage. (I used to have a video call widget and my username was "GWBasic.")

Someone once emailed me looking for support for GWBasic. They apparently got ahold of an old GWBasic program that was saved in an encrypted manner. It was run-only but they couldn't list out the source code.

I just dug out my old GWBasic manual. The command was "Save P"

Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

#22

Post by jblazevic » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 2:37 PM UTC

  --------- ---- -- ---- ----- --- ---- -----
  COPYRIGHT 1975 BY BILL GATES AND PAUL ALLEN
  --------- ---- -- ---- ----- --- ---- -----
  
  ORIGINALLY WRITTEN ON THE PDP-10 FROM
  FEBRUARY 9 TO  APRIL 9 1975
  
  BILL GATES WROTE A LOT OF STUFF.
  PAUL ALLEN WROTE A LOT OF OTHER STUFF AND FAST CODE.

Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

#23

Post by pauldavis » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 2:43 PM UTC

Does everybody know the duality of "Gee Whiz BASIC" and "Gordon Whitten BASIC"?

Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

#24

Post by andrewinardeer » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 2:45 PM UTC

A 13 year old me brought down the entire showcase of Kmart's PCs with this program back in the 80's. Good times.

Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

#25

Post by bobochan » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 2:49 PM UTC

krylon wrote: post #17

unwind wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is supposed to be "BASIC", from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code no less [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC

I knew that it used to stand for that (and as an acronym should be upper-case), but I thought they maybe dropped that somewhere along the way. Fortran and Cobol used to be "FORTRAN" and "COBOL", too, but once systems with support for upper- and lowercase-letters became widespread, they went mixed-case. I recall there was some debate if the name BASIC had been intended as an acronym initially, but in time, evidence (A…

Dartmouth celebrated the 50th anniversary of BASIC a few years ago and they were pretty consistent in keeping it all upper case.

https://www.dartmouth.edu/basicfifty/basic.html

True BASIC, a company that Kemeny and Kurtz founded in 1983, is all upper case too.

https://www.truebasic.com/about

Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

#26

Post by eggy » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 2:51 PM UTC

andrewinardeer wrote: post #24

A 13 year old me brought down the entire showcase of Kmart's PCs with this program back in the 80's. Good times.

I'd love to hear how. Did you go computer to computer, since LAN in the early 80s was not really a common thing except for big businesses. Was this late 80s? I was a Banyan Vines guy vs. Netware by then.

Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

#27

Post by quietbritishjim » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 2:54 PM UTC

jblazevic wrote: post #22

--------- ---- -- ---- ----- --- ---- ----- COPYRIGHT 1975 BY BILL GATES AND PAUL ALLEN --------- ---- -- ---- ----- --- ---- ----- ORIGINALLY WRITTEN ON THE PDP-10 FROM FEBRUARY 9 TO APRIL 9 1975 BILL GATES WROTE A LOT OF STUFF. PAUL ALLEN WROTE A LOT OF OTHER STUFF AND FAST CODE.

According to Paul Allen's book [1] about his time at Microsoft (admittedly a biased source), his particularly critical contribution was an 8088 emulator/simulator for the PDP-10. That allowed them to write and even interactively debug (if I remember right) BASIC for the 8088 on the PDP. It would've been hopeless to develop directly on a microcomputer, so they would've had to have written on the minicomputer, transferred the binary across and see if it worked, and iterate like that.

That contribution wouldn't show up directly in the BASIC source code, since the emulator wasn't part of BASIC itself.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Idea-Man-Memoir-Co-founder-Microsof...

Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

#28

Post by hypertoast » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 2:55 PM UTC

Oh - The nostalgia - the memories...

My first foray into programming. I remember skipping breaks to go to our computer room (super chilled due to Air conditioning) and popping in a 5.1/4 inch floppy diskette and loading this...

Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

#29

Post by api » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 2:58 PM UTC

The numeric scanning sub is called NUMNUM. Love it.

Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

#30

Post by andrewinardeer » Mon, Mar 07, 2022, 3:00 PM UTC

eggy wrote: post #26

andrewinardeer wrote: post #24

A 13 year old me brought down the entire showcase of Kmart's PCs with this program back in the 80's. Good times.

I'd love to hear how. Did you go computer to computer, since LAN in the early 80s was not really a common thing except for big businesses. Was this late 80s? I was a Banyan Vines guy vs. Netware by then.

Deployed the program via floppy. Edited the autoexec.bat to load the program straight away and interrupted any keyboard input such as Ctrl-C. Program layed dormant until the system clock reached a certain time then back to dos to format c: