Integer BASIC
| Developer | Steve Wozniak |
|---|---|
| First appeared | before 1977 |
| Platform | Apple I, Apple II |
Integer BASIC, written by Steve Wozniak, was the BASIC interpreter of the Apple I and original Apple II computers. Originally available on cassette, then included in ROM on the original Apple II computer at release in 1977, it was the first version of BASIC used by many early home computer owners.
Steve Wozniak first used the BASIC computer language in the late 1960s on a time-sharing computer terminal in his California high school. He read BASIC Computer Games as a member of the Homebrew Computer Club during the 1970s, and decided that any computer he designed would be able to both play the games in the book and run the logic simulations he worked with at Hewlett-Packard (HP). Wozniak knew that Bill Gates had written Altair BASIC for the Intel 8080 microprocessor, and hoped that he would be the first to write one for the MOS Technology 6502.
Wozniak would later describe his language as "intended primarily for games and educational uses". His only experience with BASIC was the few days with the time-sharing system in high school, and without access to any other system. Wozniak had to write the language—which he called "GAME BASIC"—on paper, hand assembling the language into 6502 machine code. Without any training on how to write a computer language, he used his HP experience to implement a stack machine to interpret expressions.
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