Standalone Disk BASIC-86
| Designed by | Microsoft |
|---|---|
| Developer | Microsoft |
| First appeared | 1975 (cf. Altair BASIC) |
| Stable release |
cf. Visual Basic .NET / 2015
|
Microsoft BASIC is the foundation product of the Microsoft company. It first appeared in 1975 as Altair BASIC, which was the first BASIC by Microsoft and the first high level programming language available for the Altair 8800 microcomputer.
The Altair BASIC interpreter was developed by Microsoft founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates with help from Monte Davidoff, using a self-made Intel 8080 software simulator running on a PDP-10 minicomputer. The dialect of BASIC is similar to Digital Equipment Corporation interpreters, especially in string operations, which vary between BASIC implementations. BASIC uses dynamically allocated strings which store their size. Some implementations of Microsoft BASIC support long variable names, but others do not.
Altair BASIC was delivered on paper tape and in its original version took 4 KB of memory. The extended 8 KB version was then generalized into BASIC-80 (8080/85, Z80), and ported into BASIC-68 (6800), BASIC-69 (6809), and MOS Technology 6502-BASIC (unfortunately spilling over to 9 KB, in an era when 8 KB ROM chips were standard), as well as the 16-bit BASIC-86 (8086/88). It was ideal for early ROM-based computers since it does not require an editor (until the latest versions of BASIC, each line requires a number), nor a disk drive to store object code or linked executable. It is less sophisticated than software for industrial desktop computers, which has dedicated keys to load, store, and keys for editing within a line and debugging; but personal computer pricing, in contrast, started at $1,565 rather than about $7,000.
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