On Sun, 10 Dec 2000, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> ROM BASIC existed (still exists?) on IBM computers but not IBM clones because of
> copyright. ROM BASIC is the difference between BASICA and GW-BASIC, the reason
> why BASICA runs only on IBM computers, not on clones. OS/2 Warp 4 has BASICA in
BASICA will run on clones. I've done this myself. In fact I have a game
called "donkey" that was included with MS-DOS 1.0, supposedly written
by Bill Gates himself because he thought there should be a game with DOS
and all the Microsoft programmmers were busy with other stuff. It's a
really stupid game. It was supposed to be "cow in the road" but the animal
in question looked more like a donkey. You drive a car and the animal
tries to get out of the way. Really dumb.
This game is written in BASICA. BASIC was the first Microsoft sucess
story. Adapted from other, original sources by Gates to run on various
and sundry micro-computers. The various versions were hardware specific,
I believe, until the advent of the PC.
Microsoft's deal with IBM said that BASIC had to come with every IBM-PC
sold.
MS-DOS all the way through 6.22 always included a version of BASIC.
BASICA (A for advanced)
GW-BASIC (GW for Gates, William)
Qbasic (Q for quick)
The various versions of BASIC are not always compatible with each other.
Progams written in one version may or may not run on another. Sometimes
they have to be adapted.
But, BASICA will definitely run on non-IBM computers.
>
> As far as I know, DOS 1.0 had no hard drive support. If I were to download this
> antiquated DOS, I don't know what hardware it would recognize. No CD-ROM, no
> Zip drive for lack of device driver capability. High-density 5.25" and 3.5"
> floppy drives? File I/O was by FCBs, which were superseded by file handles in
> DOS 2.0, so none of the DOS software I have would run under DOS 1. I could ask
But if you had any software that would run on DOS 1.0, it would run on
later versions of DOS. Some things like games would run too fast to be
useable, which was the reason for the "turbo" switch on many 386's--it
allows you to slow things down to run older software.
> the same questions re CP/M. Not being familiar with CP/M, and having no access
> to documentation, I'd be lost. I believe CP/M used ASCII 26 as end-of-file
> character, which is the historical source of problems in DOS with files that
> contain this character. I remember Walnut Creek CDROM, now BSDI, had a CP/M
> CDROM, discontinued and no longer available.
>
As I noted previously, you can download CP/M and it's documentation from
Caldera/Lineo ftp site. Try either www.drdos.org or www.drdos.net
All the various versions of CP/M are available for download.
Sam Ewalt
