[geeks] [rescue] BASIC

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 12:32:07PM -0700, Sheldon T. Hall wrote:
>Didn't the IBM 51xx predecessors to the 5150 "IBM PC" have either BASIC or
>APL as a sort of combination OS/language?

Yes, there was some sort of 51xx desktop computer with a choice of BASIC, APL
(or both I assume).

HP made computers in the 1960's. They had a DOS with compilers and a 16
terminal timesharing system with one processor and a 32 terminal one with two.
This was around 1968.

By 1972 (73?) they had moved on to the HP3000, which was programed in ALGOL.
It was a true stack processor, and ALGOL (or something like it) was its native
language. Borroughs had done that in the mid 1960's with the B5500 series.

The original IBM PC had a BIOS (Basic (NOT BASIC) Input Output System)
in ROM and a version of Microsoft BASIC in ROM. It had the option of up to
2 single sided 5 1/4 inch floppy drives and a cassette tape port for storage
if you did not buy the floppy option. At some point you could buy double sided
drives which gave you twice the capacity, I don't remember if they were 
available from the start, but I seem to remember they were not.

DOS formated the disks in 40 tracks of 8 soft sectors for 120k bytes per side.
Later versions of DOS included support for 9 soft sectors for 160k bytes
per side and BASICA, an improved version of BASIC which required the IBM
ROMs.

>FWIW, Microsoft has had BASIC compilers since forever; I used one under
>TRSDOS on a Radio Shack TRS-80 mod II in 1979.


Gates and Allen, later Micro Soft, later Microsoft opened up in a motel room
across the street from IMSAI, and their first product was a basic interpreter 
for the IMSAI computer. There was software piracy even then, someone stole a
copy of the interpreter on paper tape at a computer show......

Geoff.
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM