In 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).
I am really torn about this. Sure Microsoft is doing a lot of open source today (.NET core, VS Code and a bit of historic curiosities such as this one) but the "open letter to the hobbyists" still stands :) Release the Windows source code then we are talking.
Sadly 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.
In 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).
Please, put it in a public git somewhere!
Ben 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?
I am really torn about this. Sure Microsoft is doing a lot of open source today (.NET core, VS Code and a bit of historic curiosities such as this one) but the "open letter to the hobbyists" still stands :) Release the Windows source code then we are talking.
Maybe Apple can finally release MacBasic now that Microsoft can no longer stop licensing their Basic to the Apple II family.
I'll even send Bill Gates a dollar for that:
https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
Sadly 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.
I assume today typing in by hand is no longer needed, with text parsing from images being table stakes for LLMs.
I doubt the .gitignore, README.md, and SECURITY.md files were created 49 years ago, as the GitHub repo indicates :D
Do 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])
Maybe they could have implemented a useful subset of Pascal.