BASIC
From Maze
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Of course, Windows was not the first two-sided platform, nor even Microsoft's first. By retaining the rights to what IBM called PC-DOS, Microsoft had previously been able to license MS-DOS to other companies, much as they would later sell OEM copies of Windows to them. And before that, there are continuities with the company's first product line, Microsoft BASIC. BASIC was a programming language, not an operating system, but the presence of BASIC allowed for programs to be written on a computer and sometimes sold. There were two sides to BASIC: The computer companies, beginning with MITS, who wanted it on their machines and the computer hobbyists who wanted to write (and in many cases sell) BASIC programs. At Gates and Allen's company, the success of BASIC and the essential business plan used with that family of software products helped to develop the later success of MS-DOS and Windows. | Of course, Windows was not the first two-sided platform, nor even Microsoft's first. By retaining the rights to what IBM called PC-DOS, Microsoft had previously been able to license MS-DOS to other companies, much as they would later sell OEM copies of Windows to them. And before that, there are continuities with the company's first product line, Microsoft BASIC. BASIC was a programming language, not an operating system, but the presence of BASIC allowed for programs to be written on a computer and sometimes sold. There were two sides to BASIC: The computer companies, beginning with MITS, who wanted it on their machines and the computer hobbyists who wanted to write (and in many cases sell) BASIC programs. At Gates and Allen's company, the success of BASIC and the essential business plan used with that family of software products helped to develop the later success of MS-DOS and Windows. | ||
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| + | BASIC continued to develop and diverge as it came into the home. To allow programs to be written more compactly, Microsoft's Altair BASIC introduced the colon (:) as a separator of statements on the same line, so that one could write lines such as: | ||
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| + | <code>160 R=16:PRINT"HOW MANY DECKS (1-4)";</code> | ||
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| + | This feature was missing from minicomputer BASICs and the ANSI standard, and Kemeny and Kurtz saw it as potentially confusing rather than helpful. When they released their much-revised True BASIC for home computers in 1983, it did not allow multi-statement lines. The colon is, however, important to 10 PRINT; this program could not be written as a concise one-liner without it. | ||
== Tiny BASIC and Copyleft == | == Tiny BASIC and Copyleft == | ||
