There’s a fun GW-BASIC emulator written in Python that even has cassette tape audio file read access:
Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code
41–50 of 101 posts
Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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:
I must admit we did a similar thing without BASIC.
The local super groceries-and-more store had a bank of demo PCs running DOS, Geoworks or early Windows, and a screen saver. We used to type "format c: /autotest", the later being an undocumented MS-DOS parameter that skipped the "are you sure?" question, and left it standing on screen like that.
The sales personnel would occasionally terminate the screen saver by pressing "enter". Hilarity ensued (for us! Not for the poor sales person trying to give a demo to a customer) :)
As for programs and the clock, my school (which had HORRIBLE IT courses at the time) had caught a virus (not from me, just like that!).
I removed it for them (using F-PROT and McAfee for DOS back in the days), but they didn't trust that and called an "expert" business (the local typewriter guy), who ran exactly the same virus scanners, and changed them dearly. But they didn't trust him either (ahoy computer virus craze!), so they made me reinstall nine school machines, with Windows 3.1, Word 6, Excel 5, Access 2.0, from floppy disks, because I was apparently the only one capable of installing Windows.
I was so angry about the fact they didn't even properly thank me, I made a Turbo Pascal program that would also check the system clock, and do interesting things. I couldn't get a TSR working properly at the time, so I ended with an exe in the search path called " .exe" (the blank being ascii 255, not ascii 20, which wasn't allowed), and autoexec.bat would have loads of empty lines at the end, and then finally, the call to the program named with "ascii 255", which was invisible in the editor even if someone scrolled all the way down and was looking right at that particular line.
The program was reportedly still there many years thereafter. Figures :)
Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code
#43--------- ---- -- ---- ----- --- ---- ----- 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, transfer…
... an 8080 emulator, not 8088 :)
Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code
#44Why does GitHub say 40 years ago when 1983 is 39 years ago?
Because the relative date function that powers that label rounds to the nearest year (it also treats 360 days as a year):
timeAgoFromMs(ms) {
const sec = Math.round(ms / 1000);
const min = Math.round(sec / 60);
const hr = Math.round(min / 60);
const day = Math.round(hr / 24);
const month = Math.round(day / 30);
const year = Math.round(month / 12);
Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code
#45--------- ---- -- ---- ----- --- ---- ----- 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.
[deleted]
Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code
#46Does everybody know the duality of "Gee Whiz BASIC" and "Gordon Whitten BASIC"?
Greg Whitten. I don't know the answer.
Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code
#47Does everybody know the duality of "Gee Whiz BASIC" and "Gordon Whitten BASIC"?
Yes. And, there are other possible expansions, e.g. Gates William.
This is likely no different than the MZ in the DOS exe header. Nobody actually knows (and says!) what MZ stands for, but it is believed to be Mark Zbikowski.
Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code
#48Greg Whitten still lives in the area and brings one of his Ferraris to the Microsoft charity car show every year (last time it was a LaFerrari!). I hope that happens again this year.
Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
They wrote this in two months? In assembly? Impressive! I wonder if they used code generators or wrote plain assembly?
Assembly language isn't that hard. I wrote a FORTH interpreter with a pretty good standard library in 3000 lines of 6809 assembly that pretty much worked right the first time. Today you could spend as much time getting the build to work with npm or maven for something very simple. Macro assemblers are nowhere near as much fun on the x86 (and other 80's era micros) as they are on something like the IBM 360 or AVR8 wit…
Was the FORTH interpreter for your own use or did you sell it? I ask because it's always fun to see someone on HN that wrote products I saw in the pages of Rainbow long ago.
Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code
#50I love how they went through all the internal hoops to make this public and consequently put the SECURITY.md in there. Just in case someone finds a vulnerability in GW-Basic after all these years...