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Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

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Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

#71

Post by itslennysfault »

andrewinardeer wrote: post #30
eggy wrote: post #26

Earlier 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 did this with just batch scripts. Little `tty > null` and then just an infinite loop of "You've been owned" or whatever I thought was edgy back then.

Another fun one (later in the Windows '95 era) was to create a shortcut to every program on the computer in the startup folder. Then copy / paste it about a dozen times and reboot.

Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

#72

Post by gekkonier »

Emigre_ wrote: post #69
julian_sark wrote: post #32

Ah. GW Basic. Memories. On the very first day our household had a PC, they called "the guy". "The guy" was supposedly a PC guru, and he explained to me how to load a program in GW basic. And he put GW Basic in my autoexec.bat so it would launch automatically. On day #2, I had gotten hold of some games on the school yard and naturally attempted to load them in GW basic: "LOAD a:\alleycat.exe". It didn't work well. But…

Oooh Alley Cat! That game was so good!…

I never got what what to do in that room with the sleeping dogs :D Failed hard!

Good times.

Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

#73

Post by WalterBright »

WalterBright wrote: post #70
unfocussed_mike wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. There's an even more extraordinary story about them travelling to demonstrate their implementation of BASIC to the MITS team. They realise they have not written a bootloader for the Altair, and Allen writes out a bootloader on the plane, which works when they get to MITS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC#Origin_and_develo... My first encounter with a real Microsoft BASIC wasn't for another 15 years; th…

Writing an 8080 emulator on the -10 is not extraordinary, after all, it's a trivial instruction set. What was extraordinary is Allen realizing he could do this as a shortcut.

An 8080 has what, 40 opcodes? All doing simple things like "add" and "mov".

https://altairclone.com/downloads/manuals/8080%20Programmers...

Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

#74

Post by phkahler »

WalterBright wrote: post #73
WalterBright wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing an 8080 emulator on the -10 is not extraordinary, after all, it's a trivial instruction set. What was extraordinary is Allen realizing he could do this as a shortcut.

An 8080 has what, 40 opcodes? All doing simple things like "add" and "mov". https://altairclone.com/downloads/manuals/8080%20Programmers...

I learned on an 8080 system (Interact) that also had MS basic. Almost every one of 256 op-codes is used on the 8080. That's not to say there were that many instructions. For example register-to-register move might be considered one instruction but the source and destination register are encoded into that one byte so there are many reg-reg moves. Same with add sub, etc... My father wrote a disassembler in basic to read out the ROM and he made his own mnemonics which amounted to probably 20-40 actual instructions (I still have it and could look it up), but there were maybe 8 entries in the opcode table that did nothing.

Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

#75

Post by rzzzt »

gekkonier wrote: post #72
Emigre_ wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oooh Alley Cat! That game was so good!…

I never got what what to do in that room with the sleeping dogs :D Failed hard! Good times.

Drink the milk!

Unfortunately the action key is Alt which does not play along well with browsers (they want to show the menu instead): https://archive.org/details/msdos_Alley_Cat_1984

Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

#78

Post by pauldavis »

IncRnd wrote: post #47
pauldavis wrote: post #23

Does 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.

Pretty sure it is Mark Zbikowski.

Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

#79

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> 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

COBOL is still “COBOL” (at least per the IBM page on the language and the ISO/IEC 1989:2014 standard for the language.

Re: Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

#80

Post by colejohnson66 »

pauldavis wrote: post #78
IncRnd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pretty sure it is Mark Zbikowski.

To be fair, he did design the file format
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