I did a lot of programming in Microsoft BASIC (good ol' MBASIC.COM)
under CP/M as a kid in the 1980's. I even had a compiler for it. At
that time, the compiler was a rarity and expensive. I never knew
anyone that had it, at least.
That was the period where I wished my family would buy a Macintosh. At
school we had just gotten new Apple IIe computers and they opened a
computer lab. A year or so later they bought a whole crapload of
Macintosh computers. I remember being in awe of the GUI, previously my
only experience had been DOS 3.3 on the Apples and CP/M at home. This
GUI thing blew me away. Immediately I wanted one.
One of my other friends had a 128k or 512k and we would play Star Trek
on it. My best friend's mom was a teacher for the school district and
they always were getting neat new computer hardware at home. Later, I
remember when the IIgs finally came out they bought one right away, one
of first run that had Woz's signature on it. I was so jealous. It
seemed like all my friends had one kind of Apple or another, except me,
stuck with my CP/M text-based Kaypro. It was good, though; I learned
to program on that machine. I learned quite a lot about the way
computers work and how to manipulate them to do what you want. One
year I wrote an entire software suite for my parents using Microsoft
BASIC and Turbo Pascal, compiled it, and gave it to them at Christmas.
It's practical use was probably nonexistent, but I didn't care.
Many thanks to Gianluca Abbiati for helping me find the old Mac
versions of Microsoft BASIC I was looking for.
-Nat
On Tuesday, September 6, 2005, at 04:12 PM, Antonio Rodríguez wrote:
Noah Wood escribió:
What is Microsoft BASIC?
It is exactly what its name says O:-) -- the multi-platform BASIC
interpreter made by Microsoft between 1976 and the late 80s. The
Macintosh version came out in 1984, a few months after the Mac. In the
first versions, it only allowed you to make "conventional" console
(i.e., character-only) applications (as its 8-bit brothers), but later
versions allowed you to access the Macintosh Toolbox to create a fully
graphical UI, and included some other graphical tools, like an
interactive debugger and a variable/expression watch window.
Greetings,
Antonio Rodríguez (Grijan)
<ftp://grijan.cjb.net:21000/>
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