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8-bit acorn software: other • Re: Did the BBC try commissioning Microsoft to make a structured version of their BASIC?

The idea of there being a "standard" BASIC in 1980-81 is somewhat absurd. Sure, Microsoft probably had the most installations, but DEC, HP, Data General and IBM all had robust — and wildly incompatible — versions on their larger machines. Dartmouth BASIC had mostly been forgotten: if your basic doesn't have MAT commands, it's not Dartmouth-derived. Microsoft managed to produce a whole bunch of versions that didn't translate well: "crunched" spaceless Commodore V2 BASIC programs won't run on later Commodore PETs. Commodore cheaped out on updates because Jack Tramiel wouldn't pay MS for them.

Microsoft BASIC 5.0 — the one described as the baseline for BBC BASIC — was the first to conform to the ANSI Minimal BASIC standard. It's not much of a standard, but compliance did mean that Microsoft were meeting a (US) Federal Information Processing Standard, and thus their product could be used in government applications. The Dartmouth-inspired (yet very structured) ANSI Full BASIC standard came out far too late to have any relevance at all.

Statistics: Posted by scruss — Sun Feb 04, 2024 3:56 am



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