Microsoft's 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025)
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Microsoft's 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025)
1–10 of 37 posts
Re: Microsoft's 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025)
#2Ben Eater's 6502 series [1] uses MSBASIC for programming along with WozMon as the terminal interface.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypFbtuVMUVXN...
Re: Microsoft's 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025)
#3Sadly nothing in Scott's blog post about how they obtained the source. Was it still in Microsoft's archives? Did they happen upon some tractor-feed print-outs they had to type in by hand?
Re: Microsoft's 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025)
#4Ben Eater's 6502 series [1] uses MSBASIC for programming along with WozMon as the terminal interface. [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypFbtuVMUVXN...
Is that the same BASIC as this?
Re: Microsoft's 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025)
#5In 1979, I made a program called VisiBase in this BASIC.
It's a visual database modeled after VisiCalc.
That won me a joystick in at a competition by the local computer store. :-)
Still have the source, that works in an Apple 2 emulator. It's 13 K in ASCII (untokenized).
Re: Microsoft's 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025)
#6Maybe Apple can finally release MacBasic now that Microsoft can no longer stop licensing their Basic to the Apple II family.
Re: Microsoft's 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025)
#7Do you think computing history would have been much different if Microsoft made a 6502 Pascal interpreter instead?
Re: Microsoft's 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025)
#8Do you think computing history would have been much different if Microsoft made a 6502 Pascal interpreter instead?
Pascal is a lot broader language and won't fit in sub 16KB of ROM (even if you exclude monitor [call-151])
Re: Microsoft's 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025)
#9Sadly nothing in Scott's blog post about how they obtained the source. Was it still in Microsoft's archives? Did they happen upon some tractor-feed print-outs they had to type in by hand?
I assume today typing in by hand is no longer needed, with text parsing from images being table stakes for LLMs.
Re: Microsoft's 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025)
#10Sadly nothing in Scott's blog post about how they obtained the source. Was it still in Microsoft's archives? Did they happen upon some tractor-feed print-outs they had to type in by hand?
It would also be interesting why it was open-sourced now. I assume if they had done the same last year, the resulting loss of revenue would not have destroyed the plucky little $3T upstart.