The Applesoft Compiler (TASC): We have the source code, in a sense

That brings up some memories.

In the summer of 1982 I had a job working at Bell & Howell's headquarters. At the time, B&H was Apple's "in" to schools. The B&H flavor of the Apple II (1) had a black case and (2) had some extra A/V jacks on the back. No school had a budget for computers, but most had a budget for A/V equipment. B&H also had a nationwide service organization that frequented schools, due to B&H selling lots of projectors to them.

Anyway, I used a B&H Apple II to automate some accounting tasks for one department. At lunch I would eat quickly then work on the Apple II exploring it's capabilities -- simple graphics programs, etc. I ended up writing a sector editor, then used TASC to compile it to make it useful. I recall uploading the program to a BBS when I was done, as I had no personal use for it.

My pay was $5/hour, but I burned up $5/day in gas money and $5/day for food, so really I was making $30/day.

I graduated HS and went off to college, and a few times I got calls asking me to debug something or add a feature. I had the listings with me, but it would result in a painful process verbally telling a non-programmer how to edit the program. There was no ability to dial in, so it was a purely verbal process.

The article doesn't ever explicitly say so, but Chen expects the reader to understand from his words that TASC was written in Applesoft BASIC!

Further, TASC's coverage of BASIC keywords is almost entirely complete, going by chapter 7 of the manual. Any given Applesoft program has a very high chance of successfully compiling out of the box, and the very few differences with the interpreted language can be easily worked around (if the `DIM` command is any indication). As one used to aftermarket compilers that only support subsets of the language, TASC's comprehensiveness is very, very impressive.

>I tried this compiler out back in the day and found the benefits, at least with the AppleSoft programs I had access to (mostly MECC titles) were fairly negligible.

I suppose that a compiler wouldn't do much to make something like the original BASIC The Oregon Trail feel much faster; I think the sailing-on-a-raft part wasn't added until the 1985 version, which likely was not written in Applesoft.

>What rarely popped up, however, were show-stopper errors — programs would compile & run. That was nice.

Beyond being itself written in Applesoft BASIC as I noted elsewhere, TASC's coverage of BASIC keywords is almost entirely complete, going by chapter 7 of the manual. Any given Applesoft program has a very high chance of successfully compiling out of the box, and the very few differences with the interpreted language can be easily worked around (if the `DIM` command is any indication). As one used to aftermarket compilers that only support subsets of the language, TASC's comprehensiveness is very, very impressive.

"3990 Old Town Avenue, San Diego" is permanently burned into my brain. I was finally in that neighborhood about 10 years ago and visited the shrine myself, even though any evidence of the company there is long gone now.

On a side note, early Microsoft’s business strategy seems to be licensing half-baked software written by independent programmers and then making a product out of it.