BASIC was one of the few languages that was both high-level enough to be usable by those without training and small enough to fit into the microcomputers of the day. The introduction of the first microcomputers in the mid-1970s continued the explosive growth of BASIC, which had the advantage that it was fairly well known to the young designers and computer hobbyists who took an interest in microcomputers, many of whom had seen BASIC on minis or mainframes. Within the year, all interest in alternatives like JOSS and FOCAL had disappeared. Ahl to hire a programmer to produce a BASIC for the PDP-8 and other DEC machines. By the late 1960s, DEC salesmen, especially in the educational sales department, found that their potential customers were not interested in FOCAL and were looking elsewhere for their systems. JOSS was similar to BASIC in many respects, and FOCAL was a version designed to run in very small memory systems, notably the PDP-8, which often shipped with 4 KB of main memory. They had released a new language known as FOCAL, based on the earlier JOSS developed on a DEC machine at the Stanford Research Institute in the early 1960s. ![]() One holdout was Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the leading minicomputer vendor. In 1969, Dan Paymar and Ira Baxter wrote another early BASIC interpreter for the Data General Nova. In 1968, Hewlett Packard introduced the HP 2000, a system that was based around its HP Time-Shared BASIC interpreter. In contrast, an interpreter would take fewer computing resources, at the expense of performance. These machines had very small main memory, perhaps as little as 4 KB in modern terminology, and lacked the high-performance storage like hard drives that make compilers practical. The HP 2000 system was designed to run time-shared BASIC as its primary task.īASIC, as a streamlined language designed with integrated line editing in mind, was naturally suited to porting to the minicomputer market, which was emerging at the same time as the time-sharing services. ![]() By the early 1970s, BASIC was largely universal on general-purpose mainframe computers. ![]() Other companies in the emerging field quickly followed suit. General Electric, having worked on the Dartmouth Time Sharing System and its associated Dartmouth BASIC, wrote their own underlying operating system and launched an online time-sharing system known as Mark I featuring a BASIC compiler (not an interpreter) as one of its primary selling points. The use of BASIC interpreters as the primary language and interface to systems had largely disappeared by the mid-1980s.īASIC helped jumpstart the time-sharing era, became mainstream in the microcomputer era, then faded to become just another application in the DOS and GUI era, and today survives in a few niches related to game development, retrocomputing, and teaching.įirst implemented as a compile-and-go system rather than an interpreter, BASIC emerged as part of a wider movement towards time-sharing systems. Additionally, increasingly sophisticated command shells like MS-DOS and the Apple Macintosh GUI became the primary user interface, and the need for BASIC to act as the shell disappeared. Software increasingly came pre-compiled and transmitted on floppy disk or via bulletin board systems, making the need for source listings less important. ![]() A backlash against the price of Microsoft's Altair BASIC also led to early collaborative software development, for Tiny BASIC implementations in general and Palo Alto Tiny BASIC specifically.īASIC interpreters fell from use as computers grew in power and their associated programs grew too long for typing them in to be a reasonable distribution format. After the MITS Altair 8800, microcomputers were expected to ship bundled with BASIC interpreters of their own (e.g., the Apple II, which had multiple implementations of BASIC). During the Altair period, BASIC interpreters were sold separately, becoming the first software sold to individuals rather than to organizations Apple BASIC was Apple's first software product. Before Altair BASIC, microcomputers were sold as kits that needed to be programmed in machine code (for instance, the Apple I). Microsoft's first product for sale was a BASIC interpreter ( Altair BASIC), which paved the way for the company's success. Users were expected to use the BASIC interpreter to type in programs or to load programs from storage (initially cassette tapes then floppy disks).īASIC interpreters are of historical importance. An example of typing a popular program into a BASIC interpreter (in this case, HAMURABI)Ī BASIC interpreter is an interpreter that enables users to enter and run programs in the BASIC language and was, for the first part of the microcomputer era, the default application that computers would launch.
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