Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 25th Oct 2008 19:24 UTC, submitted by Michael Steil
"If you disassemble a single binary, you can never tell why something was done in a certain way. If you have eight different versions, you can tell a lot. This episode of Computer Archeology is about reverse engineering eight different versions of Microsoft BASIC 6502 (Commodore, AppleSoft etc.), reconstructing the family tree, and understanding when bugs were fixed and when new bugs, features and easter eggs were introduced. This article also presents a set of assembly source files that can be made to compile into a byte exact copy of seven different versions of Microsoft BASIC, and lets you even create your own version."
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RE: Pervasive, but no idea why
by Kroc on Sun 26th Oct 2008 09:28
in reply to "Pervasive, but no idea why"
Member since:2005-11-10
RE: Pervasive, but no idea why
by MikeekiM on Mon 27th Oct 2008 12:59
in reply to "Pervasive, but no idea why"
Member since:2005-11-16
Agreed. It was the absolute worst BASIC on ATARI as well. BASIC XL, Action Basic, C and FORTH were all better and more interesting.
But, it clearly showed Bill's business model. Low Quality & High Price. The only justification anyone could give was "it was compatible."
Member since:
2005-07-06
MS BASIC was certainly pervasive, but I still can't understand what made it popular. Of all the versions of BASIC I've used, MS BASIC was hands-down the worst. I would rewrite MS BASIC programs into a different dialect to avoid using it, that's how bad it was. That was half the reason I avoided DOS - if they couldn't even make a decent BASIC, I wasn't about to use a disk operating system from them.