Basic Will Never Die: Microsoft Open Sources GW-BASIC -- Visual Studio Magazine

Basic Will Never Die: Microsoft Open Sources GW-BASIC

By David Ramel
05/26/2020

Microsoft has open sourced GW-BASIC, a programming language developed some 38 years ago.

GW-BASIC and variants such as QBasic, QuickBasic and others provided the onramp to computer programming for many industry veterans.

(That includes this reporter, who vaguely remembers inserting two 5-1/4 in. floppy disks into a CP/M Kaypro machine, one for the OS and one for the data. I eventually found out (although maybe it was later, on a Compaq DeskPro 286) a DEBUG command would spew out a bunch of strange characters along with occasional snippets of text, and that you could substitute that text as long as it was the same length, so you could turn "Abort, Retry, Fail?" into "Abort, Crash, Fail?" if you wanted in order to customize your error message just for fun. From there I was off and running.)

Last week, Microsoft, even though it has decided not to evolve the latest variant -- Visual Basic -- as a language, threw a bone to Basic diehards.

"Since re-open-sourcing MS-DOS 1.25 & 2.0 on GitHub last year, we've received numerous requests to also open-source Microsoft BASIC," said Rich Turner, Sr. Program Manager, Windows Console & Command-Line, in a blog post.

"Well, here we are!"

As might be expected from the rabid Basic crowd, the post was replete with commentary, 52 as of this writing. The latest comment came just yesterday, on Memorial Day: "I learned to code 32 years ago in GW-BASIC . This certainly takes me back."

The code being open sourced comes from Feb. 10, 1983, and it's all in assembly, so be prepared to deal with stuff like this:

**[Click on image for larger view.]** A GW-BASIC Code Snippet *(source: Microsoft).*

The project's "Microsoft GW-BASIC Interpreter Source Code" GitHub site states the code:

Is being released for historical reference/interest purposes, and reflects the state of the GW-BASIC interpreter source code as it was in 1983
Will not be modified - please do not submit PR's or request changes
Contains no build scripts, makefiles, or tools required to generate executable binaries, nor does it contain any pre-built binaries / executables

For a trip down memory lane, check out the post, which includes fond recollections from Turner and many commentators.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.