From: William.Hamblen@nashville.com (William Hamblen)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 1997 14:32:28 GMT
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On Sat, 20 Dec 1997 02:20:10 GMT, tom.truex@k-line.org (Tom Truex)
wrote:

>But it occurred to  me that it may depend on the exact ship date,
>version, and vendor package with the Win '95 package.  However, when
>all else fails I post a message to alt.folklore.computer to see if any
>of those geniuses know if Windows 95 ever included any flavor of BASIC.

If you have the Windows 95 CD-ROM, you will find a directory on it
labeled OLDMSDOS that contains MS-DOS 6.22 versions of utilities
including QBASIC and an install script.  If your vendor omits the
CD-ROM from his package then shame on him.

######

From: boba4@ma.ultranet.com (Bob)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 1997 10:11:28 GMT
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skb@xmission.removethis.com (Scott Brown) wrote:

>  I learned Quick Basic, which was
>back when GWBasic was still contemporary...QBasic is a step backwards,

Yes, QBasic is a very underpowered subset of the Quick Basic language.
Unless one practiced a little discipline the result could be pure
spaghetti , but it sure was easy to code.  I admit that I am still
using some of the programs I wrote in those days even now, and if I
want to make some changes I'll probably fire up Quick Basic and do a
fast edit and compile rather than a translation.

Don't even mention GWBasic; it was evil incarnate.  If you have never
sat through 10 minutes of garbage collection you can have something to
be thankful for in this life.

Bob  

######

From: "George Gray" <Georgeg175@AOL.COM>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 1997 21:19:33 -0500
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>Sometimes the fingers
>work faster than the brain, and 25 year old single-malt scotch adds a
>little to the confusion.
>
>Bob

Bob,
I understand...I <hick> have <up> the zame <ugghhhh> problem!!!!


Merry Christmas All!

######

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: Mike Habicher <mhabiche@uNwOaStPeArMloo.ca>
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
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Matthew Crosby wrote:
> 
> In article <67kp5c$715@world1.bawave.com>,
> George Gray <Georgeg175@AOL.COM> wrote:
> >If I understand correctly, GW-Basic used 64K TOTAL-code AND variables. I
>                             ^^^^^^^^^
> >maybe wrong, but I distinctly remember seeing GW-Basic running, swiftly, on
> >a PC with 16k ram.  I saw it at a local computer store when they first came
> >out.  It had a cassette drive connected to it. The disk version may have
> >allowed for more (disk buffer, I would think) but the ROM version only
> >allowed 64k total.  BTW, I think IBM pc's today still ship with Basic in ROM
> >(that, tho, may have ended when the Microsoft-IBM licensing arrangement
> >ended...)
> 
> Hold on...was it GW-Basic or MS Basic?  The true blue PCs had basic in the
> roms, but I thought gw-basic (as opposed to straight basic) was the romless
> version that was disk only that MS came up for the clones.  Am I wrong?

True blue IBM-PCs had, IIRC, something innocently
called "BASIC" in ROM... or possibly C-BASIC, where
the C stood for "cassette".  No DOS, no discs, right?
You could activate it by calling INT 18h or something.

BASICA was IBM's extension to the ROM BASIC under
DOS; it had disc support, but would only run on
IBM machines because it made use of the BASIC routines
in the system's ROM.

GW-BASIC was Microsoft's "non-proprietary" <wince>
answer to the above.  And though it has been MANY
years since I've used it, I believe that it was limited
to 64K of RAM for everything: code, data, stack.
[While I'm at it, does ANYONE know what the hell
the "MOTOR" keyword did?  GW-BASIC accepted it,
but as far as I could tell, it didn't do anything.]

QBasic shipped with DOS 5.0 and could access 160K
(!) of code, data, and stack.  It was CONSIDERABLY
faster than GW.

QuickBASIC [which RULES, BTW], could make use of
the full 640K of RAM, though each module could
only contain 64K of code--so large programs were
invariably broken down into multiple .BAS files.
I don't remember exactly how it handled data, though
the /AH command-line parameter told the interpreter
and the compiler to stick arrays [of any type except
variable-length strings] into "high" memory; here,
high memory was anything outside of the current
data segment.  ;)  [Hey, this was a development
system that would compile 5,000 lines/minute on my
286!  :) ]  This applied only to arrays, though;
simple types were stored in DS.

The MS BASIC PDS 7.x on the other hand, allowed
far data; I never used it though, so I don't
recall if it could make general use of E/XMS or
anything like that.

I've since graduated to VC++ and I haven't
actually used any of the above systems in YEARS,
so don't take what I say as gospel.  :)

Seasons Greetings!
--Mike. :)

######

From: Robert Billing <unclebob@tnglwood.demon.co.uk>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 97 08:15:44 GMT
Message-ID: <882951344snz@tnglwood.demon.co.uk>
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In article <34A0B265.1D0741F6@uNwOaStPeArMloo.ca>
           mhabiche@uNwOaStPeArMloo.ca "Mike Habicher" writes:

> [While I'm at it, does ANYONE know what the hell
> the "MOTOR" keyword did?  GW-BASIC accepted it,

 I have come across a reference to a machine on which it controlled a
relay which could be used to start an external cassette drive. The
relay contacts were connected to the PAUSE socket (usually 2.5mm jack)
on the cassette deck.

-- 
I am Robert Billing, Christian, inventor, traveller, cook and animal
lover, I live near 0:46W 51:22N.  http://www.tnglwood.demon.co.uk/
"Bother," said Pooh, "Eeyore, ready two photon torpedoes and lock
phasers on the Heffalump, Piglet, meet me in transporter room three"

######

From: "Alexander Bostrom" <d96-abo@R-U-HUMAN.nada.kth.se>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 1997 11:22:51 +0100
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>The IBM PC had a version of BASIC in ROM. This cassette-only BASIC
>would run on small memory machines. Only the first ones had the
>cassette port, BTW. BASICA and GWBASIC were disk-based and essentially
>twins. The BASIC & BASICA versions were for IBM (at first because my
>Tandy 1100FD came with MSDOS v3.3 in ROM and BASIC/BASICA on disk) and
>GW was for everyone else. At least in the beginning, there weren't any
>performance differences in the two except that I think the IBM BASICA
>looked for the ROM and wouldn't run on a clone. I might not remember
>that correctly.


Nah, I remember running BASICA on an Ericsson "portable" PC clone. It was
great, it didn't even do 80-colun mode! ;-/

######

Sender: Kerry Lee High Jr <khigh01@ultra3.cs.umr.edu>
From: Kerry Lee High Jr <khigh01@umr.edu>
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
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Mike Habicher <mhabiche@uNwOaStPeArMloo.ca> wrote:
: True blue IBM-PCs had, IIRC, something innocently
: called "BASIC" in ROM... or possibly C-BASIC, where
: the C stood for "cassette".  No DOS, no discs, right?
: You could activate it by calling INT 18h or something.
[snip!]
: [While I'm at it, does ANYONE know what the hell
: the "MOTOR" keyword did?  GW-BASIC accepted it,
: but as far as I could tell, it didn't do anything.]
I believe MOTOR goes back to Cassette basic. it controled the cassette motor.

######

From: Jim DeVries <jdevries@pop.gate.net>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 24 Dec 1997 13:26:39 GMT
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Mike Habicher <mhabiche@uNwOaStPeArMloo.ca> wrote:
<snip>
>[While I'm at it, does ANYONE know what the hell
>the "MOTOR" keyword did?  GW-BASIC accepted it,
>but as far as I could tell, it didn't do anything.]

I'm pretty sure it was at least supposed to generate Int 15h functions
0 (Cassette Motor On) and 1 (Cassette Motor Off).  According to my source
these functions were supported on PcJr, PC, and Phoenix PC Bios only.

-- 

				Jim DeVries
				<jdevries@gate.net>
				'65 Monza - '94 Saturn SL2

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were 
of a contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing 
that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in 
silencing mankind."

				John Stuart Mill, from 'On Liberty'

######

From: kisrael@allegro.cs.tufts.edu (Kirk Is)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 24 Dec 1997 13:30:51 GMT
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Why the "GW" in "GW-BASIC"?

--
Kirk Israel - kisrael@cs.tufts.edu - http://www.alienbill.com
"The only intuitive user interface is a nipple"

######

From: jsavard@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca ()
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 24 Dec 1997 16:37:01 GMT
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On Sun, 21 Dec 1997 12:09:13 +0100, "Alexander Bostrom"
<d96-abo@R-U-HUMAN.nada.kth.se> wrote:

>Huh? Did GWBasic have non-trivial GC?  I used it a bit on an old computer
>but it never froze like if it was GCing.  Hmmm...maybe it doesn't get that
>bad with only 640kb RAM, or maybe I just thought it had crashed and reset
>the dang thing.

Yes, GW-Basic (or BASICA) did indeed have non-trivial garbage collection.
This applied, however, only to string variables. All variables in a BASIC
program are global and persistent, so garbage collection is only required
for strings because their _length_ can change. If a program does a lot of
string manipulation, then it indeed will freeze for GC, but not every
program will get to the point that this will happen.

John Savard

######

From: cvwd@aol.com (CVWD)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 24 Dec 1997 17:08:25 GMT
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In article <67ptiq$67b@dfw-ixnews10.ix.netcom.com>, djfirth@ix.netcom.com(David
J Firth) writes:

>The IBM PC had a version of BASIC in ROM. This cassette-only BASIC would run
>on small memory machines. Only the first ones had the cassette port, BTW.

I've still got the diagnostic boot cassette for my first IBM PC (and the tech
manual with the schematics). I have never had occasion to use either one, but
you never know.

######

From: cvwd@aol.com (CVWD)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 24 Dec 1997 17:08:26 GMT
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In article <34A0B265.1D0741F6@uNwOaStPeArMloo.ca>, Mike Habicher
<mhabiche@uNwOaStPeArMloo.ca> writes:

>GW-BASIC was Microsoft's "non-proprietary" <wince> answer to the above.  And
>though it has been MANY years since I've used it, I believe that it was
>limited to 64K of RAM for everything: code, data, stack. [While I'm at it,
>does ANYONE know what the hell the "MOTOR" keyword did?  GW-BASIC accepted
>it, but as far as I could tell, it didn't do anything.]

It starts the cassette drive.

######

From: William.Hamblen@nashville.com (William Hamblen)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 1997 21:10:51 GMT
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On 24 Dec 1997 13:30:51 GMT, kisrael@allegro.cs.tufts.edu (Kirk Is)
wrote:

>Why the "GW" in "GW-BASIC"?

Gee-Whiz.  Honest.  It referred to all those nifty graphics and sound
functions that Microsoft 8080 BASIC doesn't have, but Radio Shack
Color Computer BASIC and IBM BASIC have.

######

Path: ccw.ch!usenet
From: Neil.Franklin <Neil.Franklin.nospam@ccw.ch> (remove .nospam)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 24 Dec 1997 22:08:11 +0100
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kisrael@allegro.cs.tufts.edu (Kirk Is)
> Why the "GW" in "GW-BASIC"?

AFAIK Gee Whiz BASIC

-- 
Neil.Franklin.nospam@ccw.ch (remove .nospam), http://www.ccw.ch/Neil.Franklin/
  for Geek Code, Papernet, Voicenet, PGP public key see http:
Any computer, that is running optimally, is outdated; including my Cx486

######

From: genew@vip.net (Gene Wirchenko)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 1997 22:46:02 GMT
Organization: All USENET -- http://www.Supernews.com
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kisrael@allegro.cs.tufts.edu (Kirk Is) wrote:

>Why the "GW" in "GW-BASIC"?

     From what I've heard: "Gee Whiz!"

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

C Pronunciation Guide:
     y=x++;     "wye equals ex plus plus semicolon"
     x=x++;     "ex equals ex doublecross semicolon"

######

From: David Fenyes <dave@msrad71.med.uth.tmc.edu>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 25 Dec 1997 11:43:58 -0600
Organization: UTHSC-Houston, Dept of Radiology
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pete.fenelon@zetnet.co.uk (Pete Fenelon) writes:

> 
> From somewhere in the back of my mind, X=FRE("") buried somewhere in the
> idle loop of interactive programs comes to mind.
> 

That would return the amount of free memory (in bytes) in the variable
X.  BTW, there was also a garbage collection bug in the OSI version of
Microft's 6502 basic, and the challengers with BASIC in ROM would
often hang when running string-intensive programs.

-- 
David Fenyes                               University of Texas Medical School
dave@msrad71.med.uth.tmc.edu               Dept. of Radiology

######

From: NOT.HERE@NOSPAM.com (Steven Read)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Thu, 25 Dec 1997 14:23:36 GMT
Message-ID: <34a3635a.4184347@news.linkny.com>
References: <67rf6n$s4p@news.seed.net.tw>
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>Mike Habicher wrote --
>
>> [While I'm at it, does ANYONE know what the hell
>> the "MOTOR" keyword did?  GW-BASIC accepted it,
>> but as far as I could tell, it didn't do anything.]

From: Microsoft GW-Basic Language Features for the iAPX 88/86

Level 1 GW-BASIC Statement Extensions/  MOTOR

1.14.0  The MOTOR Statement

Function:

   The MOTOR statement turns the Cassette Motor  on or off.

Format:

           MOTOR [state]

WHERE: 

   state is a boolean value indicating On or Off.


Example:

   MOTOR 1	Turn motor on.
   MOTOR 0	Turn motor off.
   MOTOR	Turn motor back on (toggles mode).

There you go,

Steve

######

From: skb@xmission.removethis.com (Scott Brown)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Thu, 25 Dec 1997 18:05:48 GMT
Organization: XMission Internet (801 539 0900)
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On 25 Dec 1997 05:07:59 GMT, dpeschel@u.washington.edu (D. Peschel)
wrote:

>In article <67r2qb$4jd$1@news3.tufts.edu>,
>Kirk Is <kisrael@allegro.cs.tufts.edu> wrote:
>
>>Why the "GW" in "GW-BASIC"?
>
>Someone already mentioned that it might stand for "Gee Whiz".  Myself, I like
>the theory that it stands for "Gates, William".  There may be some other
>explanation involving ROT-13.

I recall reading somewhere that it's for "Graphics and Windows" or
some such nonsense.

-Scott

#######

From: spalding@iol.ie (Nick Spalding)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Thu, 25 Dec 1997 19:33:00 GMT
Organization: Ireland On-Line
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David Fenyes wrote:

> That would return the amount of free memory (in bytes) in the variable
> X.  BTW, there was also a garbage collection bug in the OSI version of
> Microft's 6502 basic, and the challengers with BASIC in ROM would
> often hang when running string-intensive programs.

The point was that FRE also forced garbage collection so that
performing it regularly prevented the string space fragmentation
getting out of hand to the point that garbage collection took forever.
-- 
Nick Spalding

######

From: gorilla@elaine.drink.com (Alan Barclay)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 25 Dec 1997 21:08:15 GMT
Organization: Gorilla & Hamster Zoo of Toronto
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In article <34a29fc4.324344580@news.xmission.com>,
Scott Brown <skb@xmission.removethis.com> wrote:
>On 25 Dec 1997 05:07:59 GMT, dpeschel@u.washington.edu (D. Peschel)
>wrote:
>
>>In article <67r2qb$4jd$1@news3.tufts.edu>,
>>Kirk Is <kisrael@allegro.cs.tufts.edu> wrote:
>>
>>>Why the "GW" in "GW-BASIC"?
>>
>>Someone already mentioned that it might stand for "Gee Whiz".  Myself, I like
>>the theory that it stands for "Gates, William".  There may be some other
>>explanation involving ROT-13.
>
>I recall reading somewhere that it's for "Graphics and Windows" or
>some such nonsense.

Back in the early 80's, I was running on a system that could boot
to CP/M or MS-DOS (Not IBM compatable). I had a choice of three
different Microsoft Basic's. 

M-Basic
G-Basic
GW-Basic

M-Basic had no graphic functionality at all. G-Basic had some, but not
all of the features of GW-Basic, while GW-Basic was esentially the same
as distributed for IBM comptables.

######

From: Charles Richmond <richmond@plano.net>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 1997 01:05:56 -0600
Organization: Cannine Computer Center
Lines: 54
Message-ID: <34A35754.771DB5D1@plano.net>
References: <882584410@k-line.org> <67itbi$qbn$1@news.kth.se> <349d3255.93381631@news.nashville.com> <67pu07$hln@dfw-ixnews8.ix.netcom.com> <67rpee$eti$1@news.iastate.edu>
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Rick Hawkins wrote:
> 
>    [snip...]     [snip...]    [snip...]
> 
> the model100/nec/olivetti, like many other 8 bit machines (trs80, pet,
> appleII+) used version 2 of MS Basic-80.  GW (Gee-Whiz!) Basic was pretty
> much version 5 of Basic-80.
> 
> Basic 80 came in three forms:  base, extended, and disk.  The basic on
> the original pc was base, while basicA was the disk version.  Generally,
> disk basic used what was already available in ROM.
> 
BASICA was *not* entirely disk BASIC. Because of contractual commitments to
Microsoft, IBM *had* to keep at least *part* of the BASICA interpreter in ROM.
This meant that you could *not* copy the executable (BASICA.EXE or BASICA.COM
or whatever it was) to an IBM clone machine and run it. The clone would *not*
have the ROM needed to execute the BASICA interpreter.

This meant that Billy could sell a copy of GW-BASIC to the owner of the clone
because he could *not* use a pirated copy of BASICA. (Yeah, I know...he could
use a pirated copy of GW-BASIC.)

Also I think that I have *some* insight into the string area garbage
collection (GC). (Someone *please* correct me if I go off into the weeds.)

A string variable in Microsoft BASIC consisted of a hunk of memory containing
a length for the string and a pointer to where the characters were stored in
the string area. Stings in the string area were atomic--i.e., they were 
*never* changed. If you built a new string an assigned it to a variable, the
new string was created in free memory from the string area. The old string of
characters in the string area would be left in tact.

Only *one* copy of a string was stored in the string area. If two string
variables had the exact same characters, their pointers would point to the
*same* string in the string area. Eventually some of the strings of characters
in the string area would have *no* string variables pointing to them. During
garbage collection, these strings of characters were removed, the remaining
strings were compacted to leave the free memory as one block, and *all* the
pointers in the string variables adjusted to point to the new location of
their characters in the string area. GC would be caused by the inablility to
allocated enough memory from the string area to support the current
operation--or by being forced by a call to FRE("").

I assume that the reason the older BASIC's would "sit and think" during GC and
the newer BASIC's do *not* "sit and think"--must be that the newer BASIC's do
incremental garbage collection. That is, every time an operation occurs on
character variables that would effect the string area, unused character string
memory would be recovered *immediately*. This way GC time is spread out across
the entire run time of the program, and *no* noticable delay would occur.

-- 
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
|     Charles and Francis Richmond     <richmond@plano.net>   |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

######

From: bayko@borealis.cs.uregina.ca (John  Bayko)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 26 Dec 1997 01:15:32 GMT
Organization: University of Regina, Dept. of Computer Science
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In article <34A0B265.1D0741F6@uNwOaStPeArMloo.ca>,
    Mike Habicher  <mhabiche@uNwOaStPeArMloo.ca> wrote:
[...]
>[While I'm at it, does ANYONE know what the hell
>the "MOTOR" keyword did?  GW-BASIC accepted it,
>but as far as I could tell, it didn't do anything.]

    The syntax of GW-BASIC was taken almost entirely from Color Basic
for the TRS-80 Color Computer. MOTOR ON/OFF controlled the cassette
recorder remote switch (the on/off switch on cassette recorder
microphones), and AUDIO ON/OFF would play the sound from the cassette
over the TV speaker. The idea was to use the computer for interactive
teaching programs, to synchronize the tape with the contents of the
screen.
    That was state of the art multimedia in 1981!

--
John Bayko (Tau).
bayko@cs.uregina.ca
http://www.cs.uregina.ca/~bayko

######

From: Sam Seiber <tingrinfan@plinet.com>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 1997 12:29:56 -0700
Organization: What?  Me Organized, Nah!
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Charles Richmond wrote:

  <snip>
> A string variable in Microsoft BASIC consisted of a hunk of memory containing
> a length for the string and a pointer to where the characters were stored in
> the string area. Stings in the string area were atomic--i.e., they were
> *never* changed. If you built a new string an assigned it to a variable, the
> new string was created in free memory from the string area. The old string of
> characters in the string area would be left in tact.
  <snip>

Also, IIRC, a line that contained something like:
  A$="This is a line of data" 
The string pointer pointed to the text within the
source code, saving string memory.  If you did
something like:
  A$="This string"+B$
Then it had to paste the two together and store them
in the string space.  Simple assignments saved space
and were not part of garbage collection.

Sam Seiber

######

From: hallj@cadvision.com (John W Hall)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 1997 13:52:20 GMT
Reply-To: Digital.Magic@cadvision.com
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dave.garland@wizinfo.com (Dave Garland) wrote:

>kisrael@allegro.cs.tufts.edu (Kirk Is) wrote:
>
>>Why the "GW" in "GW-BASIC"?
>
>Gates
>William

I read that it's "Gee Whiz"

-- 
John Hall - Digital Magic <Digital.Magic@cadvision.com>
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (Arthur C. Clarke)

######

From: rhawkins@iastate.edu (Rick Hawkins)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 26 Dec 1997 20:13:14 GMT
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa USA
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References: <882584410@k-line.org> <67pu07$hln@dfw-ixnews8.ix.netcom.com> <67rpee$eti$1@news.iastate.edu> <34A35754.771DB5D1@plano.net>
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In article <34A35754.771DB5D1@plano.net>,
Charles Richmond  <richmond@plano-dot-net> wrote:
>Rick Hawkins wrote:

>> Basic 80 came in three forms:  base, extended, and disk.  The basic on
>> the original pc was base, while basicA was the disk version.  Generally,
>> disk basic used what was already available in ROM.

>BASICA was *not* entirely disk BASIC.

Correct.  It used what was already available in ROM (extended BASIC)

> Because of contractual commitments to
>Microsoft, IBM *had* to keep at least *part* of the BASICA interpreter in ROM.
>This meant that you could *not* copy the executable (BASICA.EXE or BASICA.COM
>or whatever it was) to an IBM clone machine and run it. The clone would *not*
>have the ROM needed to execute the BASICA interpreter.

I'm not sure about this being due to "contractual committments."  Most
other machines of the era did the same thing:  extended BASIC in ROM,
then load in the rest of disk basic, which used the ROM code (apple,
pet, radio shack . . .)

>This meant that Billy could sell a copy of GW-BASIC to the owner of the clone
>because he could *not* use a pirated copy of BASICA. (Yeah, I know...he could
>use a pirated copy of GW-BASIC.)

That ends up a side effect, but he would have been perfectly happy to
sell them ROM rights jsut like he did to everyone else.  However, I'm
not aware of anyone having done this:  it was probably easier just to
deal with GWBASIC.

Also, BASIC in ROM was necessary when the IBM PC first came out.  It was
designed to run without disks, and could be purchased with just 16k (the
first model had 4 banks of 16k each on the motherboard, and from 1 to 4
could be full when purchased).  I'm not aware of any diskless clones.
Given the disk, and a "full" 64k, there was room in ram for the full
basic, and no need to spend more to include it in ROM.
-- 
R E HAWKINS
rhawkins@iastate.edu

These opinions will not be those of ISU until they pay my retainer.

######

From: rhawkins@iastate.edu (Rick Hawkins)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 26 Dec 1997 20:19:25 GMT
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa USA
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In article <67v0fk$bv8$1@sue.cc.uregina.ca>,
John  Bayko <bayko@borealis.cs.uregina.ca> wrote:
>In article <34A0B265.1D0741F6@uNwOaStPeArMloo.ca>,
>    Mike Habicher  <mhabiche@uNwOaStPeArMloo.ca> wrote:
>[...]
>>[While I'm at it, does ANYONE know what the hell
>>the "MOTOR" keyword did?  GW-BASIC accepted it,
>>but as far as I could tell, it didn't do anything.]
>
>    The syntax of GW-BASIC was taken almost entirely from Color Basic
>for the TRS-80 Color Computer.

This is just a *little* bit to strong.  The general syntax is BASIC-80, 5.0,
disk version.

> MOTOR ON/OFF controlled the cassette
>recorder remote switch (the on/off switch on cassette recorder
>microphones), 

This was hardly new in that color basic.  


-- 
R E HAWKINS
rhawkins@iastate.edu

These opinions will not be those of ISU until they pay my retainer.

######

From: "George Gray" <Georgeg175@AOL.COM>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 1997 23:13:30 -0500
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Steven Read wrote in message <34a3635a.4184347@news.linkny.com>...
>>Mike Habicher wrote --
>>
>>> [While I'm at it, does ANYONE know what the hell
>>> the "MOTOR" keyword did?  GW-BASIC accepted it,
>>> but as far as I could tell, it didn't do anything.]
>
MOTOR was a ROM-Basic holdover.  Since GW-Basic was basically the same as
the ROM-based version for non-IBM machines, all of the keywords and tokens
were left intact.  MOTOR actually controlled the relay (on the the
motherboard) that controlled the MIC on/off switch that was common on most
cheapy cassette recorders.  Early versions of GW-Basic would generate an
error if you tried to use, this was fixed in later versions.  Supposedly,
there were one or two other keywords that were left in but were useless, but
I do not know what they were.  (I think "LISTEN" was one, but again, not
sure.)

Also, GW purportedly stood for Gee-Whiz but I rather like the 'Gates,
William' that someone in this thread has already suggested.

One other observation...I, too, have noticed that certain bugs were
prevelant in most incarnations of Microsoft Basic.  I seem to remember that
Extended TRS-80 Color Computer Basic shared the same rounding errors as it's
cousin the TRS-80 Model 3 and in the Challenger.  They also supplied the
Basic that shipped with the Mattell Aquarious and, it too, had the rounding
error.  Perhaps they simply recompiled the same code using different
cross-compilers....

######

From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa or Jeff)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 27 Dec 1997 00:00:53 GMT
Organization: Net Access BBS
Lines: 9
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I was quite suprirsed--and annoyed--to discover there was no BASIC
included in Windows 95.  I assumed that there'd be at least the same
QBASIC as in DOS 5.0 .  Nope.  I had to port over my QB4.5 from my
old machine.

Indeed, they didn't include other features from DOS 5 and 6 in 95DOS.

Frustrating and disappointing.  (They apparently did enhance the EDIT
program, at least.)

######

From: nickb@primenet.com (Nick S Bensema)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 27 Dec 1997 00:27:01 -0700
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In article <67v0fk$bv8$1@sue.cc.uregina.ca>,
John  Bayko <bayko@borealis.cs.uregina.ca> wrote:
>
>    The syntax of GW-BASIC was taken almost entirely from Color Basic
>for the TRS-80 Color Computer. MOTOR ON/OFF controlled the cassette
>recorder remote switch (the on/off switch on cassette recorder
>microphones), and AUDIO ON/OFF would play the sound from the cassette
>over the TV speaker. The idea was to use the computer for interactive
>teaching programs, to synchronize the tape with the contents of the
>screen.
>    That was state of the art multimedia in 1981!

The Atari did that with POKEs in commercially-distributed foreign language
courses, some of which I'd REALLY like to have again.

There was a cartridge that would read data from the cassette while playing
audio, meaning that single cartridge could teach you anything provided you
had the tapes for it.  I think it was called the Dorsett system, and I have
a few tapes for it still, though I doubt a complete set of anything.
(They came in sets of about four tapes).  I also don't have the cartridge,
or a cassette player, though I do have an Atari XE game system which is
compatible with most of the cartridges.

These tapes would even be able to issue commands that would stop the motor
and issue a multiple-choice question.

-- 
Nick Bensema <nickb@primenet.com>   98-KUPD Red Card #710563  UIN: 2135445
~~~~ ~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~   Prepare ship for ludicruos speed!

http://www.climatefacts.org/ - Everyone but the bad boys have to behave.

######

From: fmango@xlii.netcom.com (Frank Mango)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 1997 06:05:32 GMT
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On 27 Dec 1997 00:00:53 GMT, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa or Jeff)
wrote:

>I was quite suprirsed--and annoyed--to discover there was no BASIC
>included in Windows 95.  I assumed that there'd be at least the same
>QBASIC as in DOS 5.0 .  Nope.  I had to port over my QB4.5 from my
>old machine.
>
>Indeed, they didn't include other features from DOS 5 and 6 in 95DOS.
>
>Frustrating and disappointing.  (They apparently did enhance the EDIT
>program, at least.)

It's nice that Edit is now a standalone program.  I copied the
executable from my Win95 CD to install on my old Thinkpad running
PC-DOS 6.something.  Never could get used to IBM's E editor.

OTOH, as often as not, I use a vi clone (elvis at the moment) instead
of either of these.
--
Frank Mango
           (change "xlii" to "ix" in my address to reply)

######

From: boba4@ma.ultranet.com (Bob)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 1997 07:55:17 GMT
Organization: UltraNet Communications, Inc.   http://www.ultranet.com/
Lines: 23
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"Andy Whitehouse" <awhitehouse@spambucket.ndsuk.com> wrote:

>    The following QuickBasic keywords are not supported in QBasic:
>
>        ALIAS       EVENT       LOCAL         SETMEM
>        BYVAL       $INCLUDE    SADD          SIGNAL
>        CDECL       Int86       Interrupt     UEVENT
>        COMMAND$    Int86X      InterruptX
>
>Seems to be a reasonably complete implementation to me.

1) The loss of $INCLUDE is by itself a pretty large sacrifice if you
need to do more than write a few simple lines of code.  I still have
some killer Library files to tack onto my programs.

2) QBasic doesn't let you compile; you have to run your stuff in the
QBasic environment.  My opinion, but I'd rather have an .EXE than a
BAS file when I'm finished;  I can give it to people who don't even
have Basic on their machine.  Someone else pointed out that Win95
doesn't include it anymore, so this feature is even more important
now.

Bob

######

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: "Ralph Wade Phillips" <ralphp@techie.com>
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
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Hi, Charlie!

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@sky.bus.com> wrote in article
<1977.297T2973T6666526@sky.bus.com>...
> In article <67rdnd$tfe$3@news.sas.ab.ca> jsavard@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca
> (jsavard) writes:
> 

(stuff deleted)

> I still keep a copy of GW-BASIC around, and use it whenever I need
> a quick one-shot program.  It's much simpler to use than QuirkBASIC;
> Microsoft hadn't started putting all sorts of temperamental "features"
> into it yet.  We have a lot of customer sites that we dial into with
> PC-Anywhere.  GW-BASIC works just fine in such a situation.  This
> is more than you can say for QuirkBASIC; you can't do things like
> saving or exiting without using those damned menus, and for some
> reason PC-Anywhere can't handle them, so you're screwed until you
> get someone on the other end to complete the menu entry for you
> (or you re-boot the machine, which PC-Anywhere _can_ do - just pray
> that PC-Anywhere is restarted by AUTOEXEC.BAT).

	Why not set PC-Anywhere up for one of the extended keyboard controls? 
Mode 3 works for me ... PC/Anywhere for DOS v5.x, anywho.

> 
> BTW for the fellow who asked what the GW in GW-BASIC stands for,
> I heard it was "Gee Whiz".

	That be what we were told by DEC when GW-BASIC for the Rainbow 100 first
came out ..

	RwP

######

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: "Ralph Wade Phillips" <ralphp@techie.com>
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
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Hi, Lisa or Jeff!

Lisa or Jeff <hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote in article
<681gfl$cve@netaxs.com>...
> I was quite suprirsed--and annoyed--to discover there was no BASIC
> included in Windows 95.  I assumed that there'd be at least the same
> QBASIC as in DOS 5.0 .  Nope.  I had to port over my QB4.5 from my
> old machine.
> 
> Indeed, they didn't include other features from DOS 5 and 6 in 95DOS.
> 
> Frustrating and disappointing.  (They apparently did enhance the EDIT
> program, at least.)
> 

	If you have the CDROM version, check down in the OLDMSDOS directory.

	If you DON'T, but only have the floppy version - sorry!

	RwP

######

From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa or Jeff)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 27 Dec 1997 18:13:31 GMT
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Why did M/S take out QBASIC from Windows 95 DOS?  I had hoped to share
some simple programs, assuming most people had the QBASIC on their
machine nowadays.  (Programs might need user customizing, so I couldn't
send out an .EXE without a lot of trouble.)

######

From: bayko@borealis.cs.uregina.ca (John  Bayko)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 27 Dec 1997 19:41:53 GMT
Organization: University of Regina, Dept. of Computer Science
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In article <6813gd$30s$1@news.iastate.edu>,
    Rick Hawkins <rhawkins@iastate.edu> wrote:
>In article <67v0fk$bv8$1@sue.cc.uregina.ca>,
>John  Bayko <bayko@borealis.cs.uregina.ca> wrote:
[...]
>>    The syntax of GW-BASIC was taken almost entirely from Color Basic
>>for the TRS-80 Color Computer.
>
>This is just a *little* bit to strong.  The general syntax is BASIC-80, 5.0,
>disk version.

    Microsoft Basics didn't have graphics commands before the TRS-80
Color Computer - the GW-BASIC graphics commands were taken pretty much
directly from Color Basic. I believe pretty much all other Color Basic
statements showed up in GW-BASIC, except very specific ones dealing
with the CoCo's graphics hardware.

--
John Bayko (Tau).
bayko@cs.uregina.ca
http://www.cs.uregina.ca/~bayko

######

From: karromde@nyx.net (Ken Arromdee)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 28 Dec 1997 00:35:50 -0700
Organization: None.
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hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa or Jeff) wrote:
>I was quite suprirsed--and annoyed--to discover there was no BASIC
>included in Windows 95.  I assumed that there'd be at least the same
>QBASIC as in DOS 5.0 .  Nope.  I had to port over my QB4.5 from my
>old machine.

It _is_ included with Windows '95.  It's on the CD in the othe\oldmsdos
directory.
--
Ken Arromdee                    |They said it was *daft* to build a space
arromdee@inetnow.net            |station in a swamp, but I showed them!  It
karromde@nyx.nyx.net            |sank unto the swamp.  So I built a second
http://www.inetnow.net/~arromdee|space station.  That sank into the swamp too.
--------------------------------+My third space station sank into the swamp.
So I built a fourth one.  That fell into a time warp and _then_ sank into the
swamp.  But the fifth one...  stayed up! --Monty Python/Babylon 5

######

From: lucvdv@null.net (Luc Van der Veken)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 1997 22:18:37 GMT
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On 28 Dec 1997 17:14:11 GMT, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa or Jeff) told
the world, or rather subsection alt.folklore.computers of it, that:

> > It _is_ included with Windows '95.  It's on the CD in the othe\oldmsdos
> > directory.
> 
> Are other discontinued DOS functions included that, like UNERASE?

If you mean UNDELETE, it is (and the correct directory name is
\other\oldmsdos).

Just to take up some bandwidth, the contents:

[.]               GRAPHICS.PRO      MEMMAKER.EXE      QBASIC.HLP
[..]              HELP.COM          MEMMAKER.HLP      REPLACE.EXE
[MSBACKUP]        HELP.HLP          MEMMAKER.INF      RESTORE.EXE
APPEND.EXE        INSTSUPP.BAT      MONOUMB.386       SIZER.EXE
CHKSTATE.SYS      INTERLNK.EXE      PRINT.EXE         TREE.COM
EXPAND.EXE        INTERSVR.EXE      QBASIC.EXE        UNDELETE.EXE
GRAPHICS.COM      LOADFIX.COM

MSBACKUP is in a separate subdirectory. Recommended for restore only:
in a backup, you would lose all your long filenames.

MEMMAKER runs perfectly under win95 once you copied all necessary
files to the correct places, giving you more room for dos mode
applications. But there's a better solution: don't use any config.sys
or autoexec.bat at all (or a very limited config.sys, just placing DOS
in the HMA - and I'm not even sure that's necessary).

Even for DOS mode apps, you don't need any 'old' device drivers (for
sound, CD-ROM, etc.) if windows95 is running.

Just more proof that, unlike some people say, win95 does completely
replace DOS instead of just running on top of it. In fact it's the
other way around: DOS [emulation] runs on top of win95 to provide
services to dos mode apps.

Sorry, feels like I got adrift (we were talking about BASIC, weren't
we?)

-- 
The address in the "from" field is a real address, used as a spambox.
Mail there may be read, or it may not.
If you want to be sure, replace the domain by innet.be

######

From: bjr6@freenet.tlh.fl.us (Benjamin Robinson)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 1997 22:30:00 GMT
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In "Re: back to the BASICS," Sam wrote:

>My cleverest BASIC (for getting power out of a
>machine) has to be Sinclair Spectrum BASIC. AFAIK it never needs to
>collect garbage, when it adds a variable it moves the entire contents
>of memory (48K, with a Z80) up to fit. As the variable space shrinks
>and grows it moves it all back down again.

This reminds me of a neat trick one could do with Atari BASIC.  You could
interrupt a program, change the source code, and then continue from where
you left off.  With most other BASICs, that I'm aware of, you couldn't do
this because when your source code expanded, it would overwrite your
variables.  I'm not sure how Atari implemented its BASIC, but code and data
were organized so that they would not interefere with one another.

(On the other hand, Atari BASIC didn't support string arrays.  Nobody's
perfect...)
--
Benjamin Robinson                                     bjr6@freenet.tlh.fl.us
This message may or may not contain sarcastic content; your burden to decide
    Your spam has become tiresome.  Add 1 to username to reply by e-mail
       "He had a lot to say.  He had a lot of nothing to say." - Tool

######

From: slavins@hearsay.demon.co.uk.NOJUNK (Simon Slavin)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 1997 00:27:47 +0000
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In article <681gfl$cve@netaxs.com>,
hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa or Jeff) wrote:

> I was quite suprirsed--and annoyed--to discover there was no BASIC
> included in Windows 95.

If you installed from a Win95 CD, check the rest of the CD.  There's
a directory on there with a compatible version of QBASIC.

Simon.
-- 
Simon Slavin -- Computer Contractor. | Excessive quoting from Shakespeare:
   http://www.hearsay.demon.co.uk    |                  gag me with a folio.
Check email address for spam-guard.  | -- sclerc@ernie.bgsu.edu (Susan Clerc)
Junk email not welcome at this site. | I receive about 2.5 junk emails a day.

######

From: no@spam.net (zixyer)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 1997 02:09:41 GMT
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On Sun, 28 Dec 1997 22:18:37 GMT, lucvdv@null.net (Luc Van der Veken)
wrote:

<snip>
>
>Even for DOS mode apps, you don't need any 'old' device drivers (for
>sound, CD-ROM, etc.) if windows95 is running.
>
>Just more proof that, unlike some people say, win95 does completely
>replace DOS instead of just running on top of it. In fact it's the
>other way around: DOS [emulation] runs on top of win95 to provide
>services to dos mode apps.
>
<snip>

I'm afraid it's a bit more complex than that..

Although Win'95 uses BIOS functions to say, copy a file, create a
subdirectory, etc., DOS is the OS that calls Win'95 in the first
place.  Therefore, DOS is still sitting in memory (even though it
doesn't take up much), and DOS functions may still be used by Win'95
(even though, to my knowledge, they aren't).  DOS emulation is
necessary in Win'95 to support multitasking and running the programs
in a window, DOS provides no convention to do either.  In short, DOS
is still running when you're using Win'95, it's simply running for no
reason.

					-zixyer

######

From: womble@max56.public.ox.ac.uk (Ben Hutchings)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 29 Dec 1997 03:31:27 -0000
Organization: Not organised
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In article <34a70577.1223014@news>, zixyer <no@spam.net> wrote:
>On Sun, 28 Dec 1997 22:18:37 GMT, lucvdv@null.net (Luc Van der Veken)
>wrote:
>
><snip>
>>
>>Even for DOS mode apps, you don't need any 'old' device drivers (for
>>sound, CD-ROM, etc.) if windows95 is running.
>>
>>Just more proof that, unlike some people say, win95 does completely
>>replace DOS instead of just running on top of it. In fact it's the
>>other way around: DOS [emulation] runs on top of win95 to provide
>>services to dos mode apps.
>>
><snip>
>
>I'm afraid it's a bit more complex than that..
>
>Although Win'95 uses BIOS functions to say, copy a file, create a
>subdirectory, etc.,

It does not.  The BIOS does not implement the VFAT file system.
Windows 95 does not even use the BIOS for low-level disk access; it
addresses the controller hardware directly.

>DOS is the OS that calls Win'95 in the first place.  Therefore, DOS
>is still sitting in memory (even though it doesn't take up much),

What is DOS?  The contents of the IO.SYS file?  That's all that
Windows 95 normally uses, and I suspect even that can be swapped out,
though I don't know for sure.

>and DOS functions may still be used by Win'95 (even though, to my
>knowledge, they aren't).

While Windows 95 is running, all the DOS functions are implemented by
"32-bit" code running in protected mode, not by the code in IO.SYS.
This was even true with Windows 3.11 for virtually all DOS functions,
if the appropriate options were enabled.

>DOS emulation is necessary in Win'95 to support multitasking and
>running the programs in a window, DOS provides no convention to do
>either.  In short, DOS is still running when you're using Win'95,
>it's simply running for no reason.

As far as I can see, Windows 95 has a cut-down DOS system used as the
boot-loader for a protected-mode OS.  Once that OS is loaded, the DOS
system is not called *at all* unless Windows needs to use DOS drivers
(which is not normally the case).  It is possible that the MS-DOS code
is still loaded in memory, but it is not running.
-- 
Ben Hutchings, M&CS student | Jay Miner Society website: http://www.jms.org/
email/finger m95bwh@ecs.ox.ac.uk | homepage http://users.ox.ac.uk/~worc0223/
Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat. - John Lehman

######

From: boba4@ma.ultranet.com (Bob)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 1997 07:29:11 GMT
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bjr6@freenet.tlh.fl.us (Benjamin Robinson) wrote:

>This reminds me of a neat trick one could do with Atari BASIC.  You could
>interrupt a program, change the source code, and then continue from where
>you left off.  With most other BASICs, that I'm aware of, you couldn't do
>this because when your source code expanded, it would overwrite your
>variables.  I'm not sure how Atari implemented its BASIC, but code and data
>were organized so that they would not interefere with one another.

If I recall correctly the program was stored from the bottom of the
memory working up and the data was stored from the top end working
down.  If the two met you would get an out of memory error but that
was the scheme that gave you that ability.

Maybe.  The Basic built into the old HP9845s must have done the same
thing and I may have caught it in the documentation on that beast; you
could stop and edit to your hearts content and still CONTinue the
program.

Bob

######

From: anborg <anborg@eagle.seed.net.tw>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 1997 09:32:57 -0500
Organization: SEEDNET InterNetNews News System
Lines: 11
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> <topic-drift>
> 
> What did the "GW" in "GW Basic" stand for?
> 
I thought that everyone knew that it stood for Great Western.

Best regards,

Art Borg

######

From: Max F Lang <mflang@bellsouth.net>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 1997 10:00:36 -0500
Organization: Home Computing
Lines: 23
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References: <882584410@k-line.org> <67itbi$qbn$1@news.kth.se> <349d3255.93381631@news.nashville.com> <67kp5c$715@world1.bawave.com> <67m6sf$ge5@lace.colorado.edu>
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Matthew Crosby wrote:
> 
> In article <67kp5c$715@world1.bawave.com>,
> George Gray <Georgeg175@AOL.COM> wrote:
> >If I understand correctly, GW-Basic used 64K TOTAL-code AND variables. I
>                             ^^^^^^^^^

> Hold on...was it GW-Basic or MS Basic?  The true blue PCs had basic in the
> roms, but I thought gw-basic (as opposed to straight basic) was the romless
> version that was disk only that MS came up for the clones.  Am I wrong?
 
Well, right idea, wrong words. BASIC.com and BASICA.com were the
versions included with TrueBlue PC's and needed the ROM-BASIC to run.
Running it on a clone just locked up the system. GW-Basic ran on any PC,
including an IBM system. But to complicate the terminology, Compaq
included with their version of DOS versions of BASIC/BASICA, and they
did -not- need the ROM-BASIC, and they could also run on any PC,
including non=Compaqs. Compaq DOS sure looked like PC DOS most times.
Both GW-Basic and the Compaq BASIC/BASICA run nicely under dosemu...
-- 
/\/\ax |_ang,            ...persuing cutting-edge research into the
budding Unix guru.       burgeoning field of Linux-induced insomnia!
     -x-x-x-Micro$loth or Linux: Hey, it's your computer!-x-x-x-

######

From: spalding@iol.ie (Nick Spalding)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 1997 12:05:39 GMT
Organization: Ireland On-Line
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References: <882584410@k-line.org> <349cc0ac.164174615@news.xmission.com> <349ce2ec.441762433@news.ma.ultranet.com> <67itbi$qbn$1@news.kth.se> <349d3255.93381631@news.nashville.com> <67kp5c$715@world1.bawave.com> <34a2f635.1620079@news.demon.co.uk> <34a5eff2.10299740@news.digital.net>
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Benjamin Robinson wrote:

> This reminds me of a neat trick one could do with Atari BASIC.  You could
> interrupt a program, change the source code, and then continue from where
> you left off.  With most other BASICs, that I'm aware of, you couldn't do
> this because when your source code expanded, it would overwrite your
> variables.  I'm not sure how Atari implemented its BASIC, but code and data
> were organized so that they would not interefere with one another.

Quickbasic does that, and its VB successors - even qbasic does it.
They none of them like you changing for loop variables or dim
statements and the like - for those you get a warning that if you do
that you will have to restart.
-- 
Nick Spalding

######

From: spalding@iol.ie (Nick Spalding)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 1997 12:05:41 GMT
Organization: Ireland On-Line
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Luc Van der Veken wrote:
 
> MEMMAKER runs perfectly under win95 once you copied all necessary
> files to the correct places, giving you more room for dos mode
> applications. But there's a better solution: don't use any config.sys
> or autoexec.bat at all (or a very limited config.sys, just placing DOS
> in the HMA - and I'm not even sure that's necessary).

What if you actually want to boot into DOS now and again?
-- 
Nick Spalding

######

From: Charles Richmond <richmond@plano.net>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 1997 13:04:24 -0600
Organization: Cannine Computer Center
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Benjamin Robinson wrote:
> This reminds me of a neat trick one could do with Atari BASIC.  You could
> interrupt a program, change the source code, and then continue from where
> you left off.  With most other BASICs, that I'm aware of, you couldn't do
> this because when your source code expanded, it would overwrite your
> variables.  I'm not sure how Atari implemented its BASIC, but code and data
> were organized so that they would not interefere with one another.
> 
It seems like this should work with BASICA and GW-BASIC, because they used one
64k segment for the program and another 64k segment for the data. So expanding
the source could *not* destroy the data segment (at least if the segments were
set up to be disjoint, and I think they always were.) In fact, when I took a
course that included BASIC programming years ago, one of the selling points
for BASIC was that you could stop the running program, change values of
variables, and then continue the program.

-- 
+----------------------------------------------------------+
|     Charles and Francis Richmond     <richmond@plano.net>             |
+----------------------------------------------------------+

######

From: rhawkins@iastate.edu (Rick Hawkins)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 29 Dec 1997 16:02:37 GMT
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa USA
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Message-ID: <688hit$84v$1@news.iastate.edu>
References: <882584410@k-line.org> <67v0fk$bv8$1@sue.cc.uregina.ca> <6813gd$30s$1@news.iastate.edu> <683lm1$i6m$1@sue.cc.uregina.ca>
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In article <683lm1$i6m$1@sue.cc.uregina.ca>,
John  Bayko <bayko@borealis.cs.uregina.ca> wrote:
>In article <6813gd$30s$1@news.iastate.edu>,
>    Rick Hawkins <rhawkins@iastate.edu> wrote:
>>In article <67v0fk$bv8$1@sue.cc.uregina.ca>,
>>John  Bayko <bayko@borealis.cs.uregina.ca> wrote:
>[...]
>>>    The syntax of GW-BASIC was taken almost entirely from Color Basic
>>>for the TRS-80 Color Computer.
>>
>>This is just a *little* bit to strong.  The general syntax is BASIC-80, 5.0,
>>disk version.

>    Microsoft Basics didn't have graphics commands before the TRS-80
>Color Computer - the GW-BASIC graphics commands were taken pretty much
>directly from Color Basic. I believe pretty much all other Color Basic
>statements showed up in GW-BASIC, except very specific ones dealing
>with the CoCo's graphics hardware.

???

There was no standardized set, but just off the cuff, compucolor
(bizzare implementation in which damn near every control function was
through the PLOT command, including actual graphics), trs80
model 1 (pset/(uh, i forget how to turn it off)), applesoft (commands
for the hires graphics that needed machine calls from integer basic) 
.. . .

The specific commands for the graphics may have originated in the coco,
but I don't think that there's any other syntax in basica or gwbasic
that was not present in version 5 of basic 80 (which I became all to
familiar with many years ago :).  For that matter, i think that there's
only a couple of syntax changes from 4.51 to 5.0.  I'm probably going to
get this wrong, as I never used version 4.x, and haven't worried about
this for 5 years, but the bit i can recall is that there's a different
usage of commas in formatted printing, a difference in whether or not
the first pass of for/next is executed, and introduction of while/wend.

-- 
R E HAWKINS
rhawkins@iastate.edu

These opinions will not be those of ISU until they pay my retainer.

######

From: rhawkins@iastate.edu (Rick Hawkins)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 29 Dec 1997 16:22:34 GMT
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa USA
Lines: 27
Message-ID: <688ioa$u7o$1@news.iastate.edu>
References: <882584410@k-line.org> <34a2f635.1620079@news.demon.co.uk> <34a5eff2.10299740@news.digital.net> <34a791cf.54416614@news.iol.ie>
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In article <34a791cf.54416614@news.iol.ie>,
Nick Spalding <spalding@iol.ie> wrote:
>Benjamin Robinson wrote:
>
>> This reminds me of a neat trick one could do with Atari BASIC.  You could
>> interrupt a program, change the source code, and then continue from where
>> you left off.  With most other BASICs, that I'm aware of, you couldn't do
>> this because when your source code expanded, it would overwrite your
>> variables.  I'm not sure how Atari implemented its BASIC, but code and data
>> were organized so that they would not interefere with one another.
>
>Quickbasic does that, and its VB successors - even qbasic does it.
>They none of them like you changing for loop variables or dim
>statements and the like - for those you get a warning that if you do
>that you will have to restart.

and mbasic 5.  It had both MERGE and CHAIN commands, which could be used
to swap in code, or to transfer to another program, passing the
variables along.



-- 
R E HAWKINS
rhawkins@iastate.edu

These opinions will not be those of ISU until they pay my retainer.

######

From: genew@vip.net (Gene Wirchenko)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 1997 20:15:38 GMT
Organization: All USENET -- http://www.Supernews.com
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Message-ID: <34a7eec2.11423362@news.vip.net>
References: <882584410@k-line.org> <67v0fk$bv8$1@sue.cc.uregina.ca> <6813gd$30s$1@news.iastate.edu> <683lm1$i6m$1@sue.cc.uregina.ca> <688hit$84v$1@news.iastate.edu>
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rhawkins@iastate.edu (Rick Hawkins) wrote:

>In article <683lm1$i6m$1@sue.cc.uregina.ca>,
>John  Bayko <bayko@borealis.cs.uregina.ca> wrote:
>>In article <6813gd$30s$1@news.iastate.edu>,
>>    Rick Hawkins <rhawkins@iastate.edu> wrote:
>>>In article <67v0fk$bv8$1@sue.cc.uregina.ca>,
>>>John  Bayko <bayko@borealis.cs.uregina.ca> wrote:
>>[...]
>>>>    The syntax of GW-BASIC was taken almost entirely from Color Basic
>>>>for the TRS-80 Color Computer.
>>>
>>>This is just a *little* bit to strong.  The general syntax is BASIC-80, 5.0,
>>>disk version.
>
>>    Microsoft Basics didn't have graphics commands before the TRS-80
>>Color Computer - the GW-BASIC graphics commands were taken pretty much
>>directly from Color Basic. I believe pretty much all other Color Basic
>>statements showed up in GW-BASIC, except very specific ones dealing
>>with the CoCo's graphics hardware.
>
>???
>
>There was no standardized set, but just off the cuff, compucolor
>(bizzare implementation in which damn near every control function was
>through the PLOT command, including actual graphics), trs80
>model 1 (pset/(uh, i forget how to turn it off)), applesoft (commands
>for the hires graphics that needed machine calls from integer basic) 
>. . .

     Uh, we're talking Microsoft BASIC here.  I don't know about
Compucolor, but Applesoft wasn't a Microsoft BASIC.

     While "pset" was used in some dialects, in TRS-80 Model I Level
II BASIC (tape and disk), it was
          set(expr1,expr2)
Turning off a pixel was with
          reset(expr1,expr2)

>The specific commands for the graphics may have originated in the coco,

     Some, probably, but the was a Level III BASIC for the TRS-80
Model I.  It had a number of graphics commands.  These or a derivative
made it to IBM PC BASIC.

>but I don't think that there's any other syntax in basica or gwbasic
>that was not present in version 5 of basic 80 (which I became all to
>familiar with many years ago :).  For that matter, i think that there's

     Some functions.

>only a couple of syntax changes from 4.51 to 5.0.  I'm probably going to

     Yes, but there were semantic changes.  tab() started with column
0 in 4 and with 1 in 5.  Float to integer conversion truncated in 4
and rounded in 5.  This latter flies against convention.  The big
noticeable change was that crunching was no longer legal.  e.g.
          10PRINTA
was legal in 4, but not in 5.

>get this wrong, as I never used version 4.x, and haven't worried about
>this for 5 years, but the bit i can recall is that there's a different
>usage of commas in formatted printing, a difference in whether or not
>the first pass of for/next is executed, and introduction of while/wend.

     That's about it.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

C Pronunciation Guide:
     y=x++;     "wye equals ex plus plus semicolon"
     x=x++;     "ex equals ex doublecross semicolon"

######

From: genew@vip.net (Gene Wirchenko)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 19:30:37 GMT
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"George Gray" <Georgeg175@AOL.COM> wrote:

>
>Gene Wirchenko wrote in message <34a7eec2.11423362@news.vip.net>...
>>rhawkins@iastate.edu (Rick Hawkins) wrote:
>>>There was no standardized set, but just off the cuff, compucolor
>>>(bizzare implementation in which damn near every control function was
>>>through the PLOT command, including actual graphics), trs80
>>>model 1 (pset/(uh, i forget how to turn it off)), applesoft (commands
>>>for the hires graphics that needed machine calls from integer basic)
>>>. . .
>>
>>     Uh, we're talking Microsoft BASIC here.  I don't know about
>>Compucolor, but Applesoft wasn't a Microsoft BASIC.
>                                --------------------------------------------
>-----
>You are wrong, my friend!  Apple INTEGER basic was NOT Microsoft, but
>Microsoft, did, in fact, write Applesoft-hence the SOFT in the name.  If you
>look into the Applesoft code, you can find the copyright message buried in
>there.

     Ah, well, I wasn't an Apple user.  What I meant was that it
wasn't what was commonly called Microsoft BASIC which was quite
standardized.

>>     While "pset" was used in some dialects, in TRS-80 Model I Level
>>II BASIC (tape and disk), it was
>>          set(expr1,expr2)
>>Turning off a pixel was with
>>          reset(expr1,expr2)
>>
>>>The specific commands for the graphics may have originated in the coco,
>>
>>     Some, probably, but the was a Level III BASIC for the TRS-80
>>Model I.  It had a number of graphics commands.  These or a derivative
>>made it to IBM PC BASIC.
>Again, you are not quite right.  Extended Color Basic for TRS-80 Color
>Computer WAS the first implementation of a Microsoft Basic that contained a
>standard keyword set.  Just about ALL of the Extended Color Basic keywords

     No, MBASIC 4 was much earlier.  Level III also predated the Color
Computer.  At one point, Microsoft had some sort of system in place
where they could generate a BASIC for a Z-80 system quite easily.

     Expanded graphics capabilities required additions to the
language, but the base was already there.

>made it into GW-Basic and it's derivative (including the 'official' IBM
>version.)  The infamous MOTOR ON/MOTOR OFF statements were also included in
>the CoCo version (and do, in fact, go waaaaay back to Level II Basic.)  The

     There was no motor command in Level II BASIC.  (You could out to
port 255.  I forget which bit controlled the tape drive motor, but I
think it was bit 0.  Set was on, reset was off.)

>Basic that shipped with the Mattell Aquarious as well as a few other home
>PC's built AFTER the CoCo contained the SAME keyword set.  Only the Extended
>Disk Basic keywords changed.

     I bet if you look at MBASIC, you'll see most or all of those.

>I remember taking some of my CoCo Basic code and using on the IBM with
>little or no change...unheard of then!  Imagine, a 'standard' as far
>'standards' went, back then.

     TRS-80 BASIC was based on MBASIC 4.  Commodore BASIC was as well
though it had rather different disk and error handling.  Applesoft was
a different creature.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

C Pronunciation Guide:
     y=x++;     "wye equals ex plus plus semicolon"
     x=x++;     "ex equals ex doublecross semicolon"

######

From: rhawkins@iastate.edu (Rick Hawkins)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 30 Dec 1997 22:19:21 GMT
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa USA
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In article <34a7eec2.11423362@news.vip.net>,
Gene Wirchenko <genew@vip.net> wrote:

>     Uh, we're talking Microsoft BASIC here.  I don't know about
>Compucolor, but Applesoft wasn't a Microsoft BASIC.

Beg Pardon?  I believe it even had a microsoft copyright that displayed.
It had a different precision FP (9? instead of 6/12), but it was
microsoft.  The original integer basic, however, was not.


>     While "pset" was used in some dialects, in TRS-80 Model I Level
>II BASIC (tape and disk), it was
>          set(expr1,expr2)
>Turning off a pixel was with
>          reset(expr1,expr2)

It's been a while :)  maybe i'm thinking of the 102 . . .

>>The specific commands for the graphics may have originated in the coco,

>     Some, probably, but the was a Level III BASIC for the TRS-80
>Model I.  It had a number of graphics commands.  These or a derivative
>made it to IBM PC BASIC.

Level 3? I don't recall that.  But then, I returned my model I when I
found that it couldn't count.  The fp was so bad that 3^4 was 81.001,
and for i=-1 to 1, step .1 missed 0 . . .



>     Yes, but there were semantic changes.  tab() started with column
>0 in 4 and with 1 in 5.  Float to integer conversion truncated in 4
>and rounded in 5.  This latter flies against convention.  The big
>noticeable change was that crunching was no longer legal.  e.g.
>          10PRINTA
>was legal in 4, but not in 5.

This sets a couple of dusty neurons firing (ach-oo!)
-- 
R E HAWKINS
rhawkins@iastate.edu

These opinions will not be those of ISU until they pay my retainer.

######

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: "Ralph Wade Phillips" <ralphp@techie.com>
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
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Hi, Gene!


Gene Wirchenko <genew@vip.net> wrote in article
<34a7eec2.11423362@news.vip.net>...
> rhawkins@iastate.edu (Rick Hawkins) wrote:
> 
> >In article <683lm1$i6m$1@sue.cc.uregina.ca>,
> >John  Bayko <bayko@borealis.cs.uregina.ca> wrote:
> >>In article <6813gd$30s$1@news.iastate.edu>,
> >>    Rick Hawkins <rhawkins@iastate.edu> wrote:
> >>>In article <67v0fk$bv8$1@sue.cc.uregina.ca>,
> >>>John  Bayko <bayko@borealis.cs.uregina.ca> wrote:
> >>[...]
> >>>>    The syntax of GW-BASIC was taken almost entirely from Color Basic
> >>>>for the TRS-80 Color Computer.
> >>>
> >>>This is just a *little* bit to strong.  The general syntax is
BASIC-80, 5.0,
> >>>disk version.
> >
> >>    Microsoft Basics didn't have graphics commands before the TRS-80
> >>Color Computer - the GW-BASIC graphics commands were taken pretty much
> >>directly from Color Basic. I believe pretty much all other Color Basic
> >>statements showed up in GW-BASIC, except very specific ones dealing
> >>with the CoCo's graphics hardware.
> >
> >???
> >
> >There was no standardized set, but just off the cuff, compucolor
> >(bizzare implementation in which damn near every control function was
> >through the PLOT command, including actual graphics), trs80
> >model 1 (pset/(uh, i forget how to turn it off)), applesoft (commands
> >for the hires graphics that needed machine calls from integer basic) 
> >. . .
> 
>      Uh, we're talking Microsoft BASIC here.  I don't know about
> Compucolor, but Applesoft wasn't a Microsoft BASIC.

	You MIGHT want to double-check that there copyright - Microsoft owns it!

	That's AppleSoft alright - Apple's Integer BASIC was written by the WOZ,
but AppleSoft was written by Microsoft (hence the "SOFT" portion .. <B-) )

	CompuColor's big BASIC was also written by Microsoft.

	(the rest deleted to please my news server ... )

	RwP

######

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: "Ralph Wade Phillips" <ralphp@techie.com>
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
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Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 22:36:02 GMT
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Hi there!

Matt Ackeret <mattack@area.com> wrote in article
<689ms2$isp$1@nixon.area.com>...
> In article <688hit$84v$1@news.iastate.edu>,
> Rick Hawkins <rhawkins@iastate.edu> wrote:
> >applesoft (commands
> >for the hires graphics that needed machine calls from integer basic) 
> 
> What does this mean?  On this GS I'm typing on right now, integer BASIC
> isn't loaded [I'd have to hook up my 5.25" drives and find a DOS 3.3
System
> Master to do that], but I can go into AppleSoft and make graphics calls
> just fine.   On a ][+ or later, you almost certainly *don't* have Integer
> loaded most of the time.

	True.  What Rick SAID, and what he MEANT, was that those same hires
graphics calls had to be done as machine language calls in Integer BASIC,
but were BASIC commands in AppleSoft.

	RwP

######

From: genew@vip.net (Gene Wirchenko)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 1997 01:20:37 GMT
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rhawkins@iastate.edu (Rick Hawkins) wrote:

>In article <34a92f43.5878079@news.vip.net>,
>Gene Wirchenko <genew@vip.net> wrote:
>>"George Gray" <Georgeg175@AOL.COM> wrote:
>
>>>
>>>Gene Wirchenko wrote in message <34a7eec2.11423362@news.vip.net>...
>>>>rhawkins@iastate.edu (Rick Hawkins) wrote:
>
>>>>     Some, probably, but the was a Level III BASIC for the TRS-80
>>>>Model I.  It had a number of graphics commands.  These or a derivative
>>>>made it to IBM PC BASIC.
>>>Again, you are not quite right.  Extended Color Basic for TRS-80 Color
>>>Computer WAS the first implementation of a Microsoft Basic that contained a
>>>standard keyword set.  Just about ALL of the Extended Color Basic keywords
>
>>     No, MBASIC 4 was much earlier.  Level III also predated the Color
>>Computer.  At one point, Microsoft had some sort of system in place
>>where they could generate a BASIC for a Z-80 system quite easily.
>
>
>one of the things that I threw away, years ago, was their product
>catalog, which specified exactly what you had to do to get a custom
>BASIC.  But I think it used 8080, not z80, as the base.  And the 6800
>and 6502 versions were apparently derivatives/crosscompiles of basic-80.

     I wasn't sure if the base was Z-80 or 8080.  By the time I was
using the 8080 family, Z-80 was the chip of choice.

>>>Basic that shipped with the Mattell Aquarious as well as a few other home
>>>PC's built AFTER the CoCo contained the SAME keyword set.  Only the Extended
>>>Disk Basic keywords changed.
>>
>>     I bet if you look at MBASIC, you'll see most or all of those.
>>
>>>I remember taking some of my CoCo Basic code and using on the IBM with
>>>little or no change...unheard of then!  Imagine, a 'standard' as far
>>>'standards' went, back then.
>
>>     TRS-80 BASIC was based on MBASIC 4.  Commodore BASIC was as well
>>though it had rather different disk and error handling.  Applesoft was
>>a different creature.
>
>version 4?  weren't they all variants of version 2?  It seems to me that
>they were lacking the random file access of versions 4 & 5, and  had a
>significantly different syntax for opening files.

     Microsoft BASIC version 4.
     ^^^^^^^^^

     Commodore had their own version numbers for their BASIC.  2 and 4
of theirs are the ones I know about.  Commodore BASIC 2 was
cassette-based and 4 was disk-based.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

C Pronunciation Guide:
     y=x++;     "wye equals ex plus plus semicolon"
     x=x++;     "ex equals ex doublecross semicolon"

######

From: genew@vip.net (Gene Wirchenko)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 1997 01:20:40 GMT
Organization: All USENET -- http://www.Supernews.com
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rhawkins@iastate.edu (Rick Hawkins) wrote:

>In article <34a7eec2.11423362@news.vip.net>,
>Gene Wirchenko <genew@vip.net> wrote:
[snip]

>>     Some, probably, but the was a Level III BASIC for the TRS-80
>>Model I.  It had a number of graphics commands.  These or a derivative
>>made it to IBM PC BASIC.
>
>Level 3? I don't recall that.  But then, I returned my model I when I
>found that it couldn't count.  The fp was so bad that 3^4 was 81.001,
>and for i=-1 to 1, step .1 missed 0 . . .

     Level III was a product from Microsoft that added functions to
Level II tape BASIC.  It was not widely known.

     That was your error in using FP.  As .1 can't be represented
exactly internally, you have round-off errors.  It would have been
better to code as
          for ib=-10 to 10
          i=ib/10

[snip]

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

C Pronunciation Guide:
     y=x++;     "wye equals ex plus plus semicolon"
     x=x++;     "ex equals ex doublecross semicolon"

######

From: genew@vip.net (Gene Wirchenko)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 1997 18:36:04 GMT
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lucvdv@null.net (Luc Van der Veken) wrote:

>On Mon, 29 Dec 1997 20:15:38 GMT, genew@vip.net (Gene Wirchenko) told
>the world, or rather subsection alt.folklore.computers of it, that:
>
>>      While "pset" was used in some dialects, in TRS-80 Model I Level
>> II BASIC (tape and disk), it was
>>           set(expr1,expr2)
>> Turning off a pixel was with
>>           reset(expr1,expr2)
>
>Correct - except that this wasn't really graphics (compared to GWBasic
>and the like).
>These instructions wouldn't set/reset a pixel, but a block of pixels
>(1/6 of a character, if I remember correctly).

     Please don't redefine the language.  "pixel" comes from "picture
element".  A block of monitor dots can also be considered a pixel and
WAS.  Yes, it's low res.  Yes, it was 1/6 of a char.

>The character set had some (2^6 ?) extended characters that formed all
>possible combinations of these pixel blocks, and the set/reset
>instructions just put the right ascii character onscreen.

     Yes, 128 to 191.

>You could display graphics using chr$ or string variables much faster
>than using set.

     With static displays, yes.  It was often quicker to use set/reset
when graphing.

>The model IV had the same characters, but because of a smaller
>character cell (8 scanlines instead of 9 I think) the lower 2 blocks
>were slightly smaller than the other 4.

     Yuck!

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

C Pronunciation Guide:
     y=x++;     "wye equals ex plus plus semicolon"
     x=x++;     "ex equals ex doublecross semicolon"

######

From: genew@vip.net (Gene Wirchenko)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 1997 18:36:06 GMT
Organization: All USENET -- http://www.Supernews.com
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lucvdv@null.net (Luc Van der Veken) wrote:

>On Tue, 30 Dec 1997 19:43:59 GMT, bmarcum@iglou.com told the world, or
>rather subsection alt.folklore.computers of it, that:
>
>> In the Timex Sinclair 1000 (ZX81), the save command would save the program,
>> variables, and even screen contents.  If you used SAVE inside a program,
>> when you loaded the tape it would continue from the instruction after
>> the SAVE.
>
>I seem to remember this 'feature' (without the screen save) from
>another system too. Could it have been TRS-80 model I? Or plain
>BASIC-80 on 8080 CP/M systems?

     TRS-80 Model I: no.
     CP/M BASIC-80: almost certainly no.
     These two BASICs would have been very similar.

>It's also possible that I'm mixing this up with a MERGE statement,
>which also continued with the next statement as it found it after the
>merge (used it to load overlays there).

     IIRC, it was the CHAIN statement with the MERGE option that did
this.  MERGE was also a statement and was comparable to LOAD i.e.
execution did not continue.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

C Pronunciation Guide:
     y=x++;     "wye equals ex plus plus semicolon"
     x=x++;     "ex equals ex doublecross semicolon"

######

From: Ben Hutchings <worc0223@sable.ox.ac.uk>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 31 Dec 1997 21:01:56 -0000
Organization: Oxford University
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In article <689qm7$pi$1@max94.public.ox.ac.uk>, I wrote:
<snip>
>Last time I looked, selecting "Restart in DOS mode" would execute the
>shortcut "Exit to DOS.lnk" in the Windows directory, which in a
          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
That should be "Exit to DOS.pif" actually... but who cares?

-- 
Ben Hutchings, M&CS student | Jay Miner Society website: http://www.jms.org/
email/finger m95bwh@ecs.ox.ac.uk | homepage http://users.ox.ac.uk/~worc0223/
This sentence contradicts itself - no actually it doesn't. - Hofstadter

######

From: William.Hamblen@nashville.com (William Hamblen)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Thu, 01 Jan 1998 03:48:36 GMT
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On Mon, 29 Dec 1997 20:15:38 GMT, genew@vip.net (Gene Wirchenko)
wrote:

>     Uh, we're talking Microsoft BASIC here.  I don't know about
>Compucolor, but Applesoft wasn't a Microsoft BASIC.

Most of Applesoft BASIC was Microsoft 6502 BASIC.  Applesoft was a
punning reference to Microsoft.

The graphics and sound commands in Radio Shack Color Computer BASIC
are essentially the same in as IBM ROM BASIC.  That is no surprise
because both came from the same shop.  Radio Shack Disk Extended BASIC
is clearly related to Altair Disk BASIC.  Microsoft wrote a 6800 BASIC
for the Altair 680.  A company called GRT, originally GRT Record
Pressing, that was in the country-western record business decided to
get into the software business and issued some programs, including
Microsoft 8K BASIC for the SWTPC 6800.  Their software effort was a
complete flop and GRT itself went out of business later.  My copy of
Microsoft 6800 BASIC credits Paul Allen as the author.  Microsoft
BASIC tended to do cute things to save a little memory.  Like jumping
to the second byte of an instruction.

######

From: Tom Seddon <tom@sunholme.demon.co.uk>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Thu, 1 Jan 1998 15:26:44 +0000
Distribution: world
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In article <34a81a6b.128476@news.innet.be>, Luc Van der Veken
<lucvdv@null.net> writes
>On Mon, 29 Dec 1997 12:05:41 GMT, spalding@iol.ie (Nick Spalding) told
>the world, or rather subsection alt.folklore.computers of it, that:
>Perhaps you noticed files called CONFIG.DOS and AUTOEXEC.DOS in your
>root directory.
> ...
>After you enter the EXIT command, the system reboots in windoze mode,
>and the files are renamed back to .DOS somewhere in the process.

>Your original config.sys and autoexec.bat, if present, are renamed to
>something else also while you're in DOS mode (I don't know what, they
>don't exist on my system), and put back afterwards.

Actually CONFIG.DOS and AUTOEXEC.DOS are used, along with IO.DOS,
MSDOS.DOS and COMMAND.DOS in multi-booting with your previous version of
MS-DOS. (F8 for the boot menu, it's the last option.) If you don't have
a previous version of MS-DOS, grab a DOS 6 boot disk and copy the files
IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS, COMMAND.COM and AUTOEXEc.BAT and CONFIG.SYS onto the
hard drive in the root directory, changing each one's extension to
'.DOS'. Now go into MSDOS.SYS, and change the line reading 'BootMulti=0'
to 'BootMulti=1'. Now when you get the F8 menu you can select 'Boot to
previous MS-DOS version', which allows you to have an alternative set of
config.sys/autoexec.bat commands, although you do have to run the old
MS-DOS which is a shame :-(

Don't try this with the Windows that comes with FAT32 by the way! It
boots into DOS 6 alright, but when you reboot it doesn't change things
back and it all screws up :-( You have to do an fdisk /mbr (I seem to
remember), delete all the DOS 6 files and rename the Win '95 files (all
have the extension .W40 at this point) back to normal. Only then will it
work again...


>
>Now it's a pity that this process requires firing up windows first
>(just booting straight to DOS doesn't do the trick).
>A 'little' detour :)
>
>It must be possible to do it using multiple configurations in your
>config.sys also: just leave the sections that are executed when you
>start up windows empty.
>

To do this edit MSDOS.SYS and change the line reading 'BootGUI=1' to
'BootGUI=0'. Now, by default, the Windows '95 graphical bit won't be
laoded -- you will boot into dos 7. (You can also add a line in the
[Options] section saying 'Logo=0' to turn that annoying logo off.) If
you don't do this, the config sections executed when DOS is selected
will load all the device drivers required, get to the end of
autoexec.bat and run Windows '95 anyway.

If you want to load Windows as normal, just run the command WIN. If
you've used F5/F8 menu to get safe mode, it won't load Windows '95 but
it seems to remember this so when you type WIN it runs safe mode without
you needing to use the appropriate command-line switches.

Furthermore, add the line DOS=NOAUTO (perhaps DOS=HIGH,NOAUTO,UMB) and
Windows '95 will act just like DOS 6.22 -- it won't load SETVER,
HIMEM.SYS etc automatically, and you can allocate the memory as you
want. (Normally it loads SETVER into the first place it finds, which is
most usually (esp. with QEMM and small UMB regions shoehorned into
strange places) an inconvenient one.)

The one caveat is that if you want to run Windows you *must* have a line
in the 'Run windows 95' section of config.sys reading something like
'device=c:\windows\ifshlp.sys' -- ifshlp.sys is still there (as with
WFWG3.11) but it is loaded automatically normally so you won't see it!
Once you have NOAUTO it stops doing this though...

OK, I hope that wasn't all useless information :-) Surprisingly few
people seem to know about it though.

--Tom

######

From: J. Chris Hausler <jchausler@delphi.com>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Thu, 1 Jan 98 17:14:01 -0500
Organization: Delphi (info@delphi.com email, 800-695-4005 voice)
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William Hamblen <William.Hamblen@nashville.com> writes:
 
>The graphics and sound commands in Radio Shack Color Computer BASIC
>are essentially the same in as IBM ROM BASIC.  That is no surprise
>because both came from the same shop.  Radio Shack Disk Extended BASIC
>is clearly related to Altair Disk BASIC.  Microsoft wrote a 6800 BASIC
>for the Altair 680.  A company called GRT, originally GRT Record
>Pressing, that was in the country-western record business decided to
>get into the software business and issued some programs, including
>Microsoft 8K BASIC for the SWTPC 6800.  Their software effort was a
>complete flop and GRT itself went out of business later.  My copy of
>Microsoft 6800 BASIC credits Paul Allen as the author.  Microsoft
 
Of course, you could be talking about something I somehow missed
but the only 6800 Basic published on a record I ever came
across was Robert Uiterwyk's 4K 6800 Basic which Interface Age
Magazine included in their May 1977 issue as their first "Floppy ROM".
The record manufacturer was Eva-Tone Soundsheets of Deerfield, Ill.
which normally used their flexible record technology to produce
short "music samplers".  They were not the instigators of the Floppy
ROM however, it was the magazine which just used Eva-Tone's technology.
Chris

######

From: William.Hamblen@nashville.com (William Hamblen)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Fri, 02 Jan 1998 02:44:43 GMT
Organization: Utterly Disorganized
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On Thu, 1 Jan 98 17:14:01 -0500, J. Chris Hausler
<jchausler@delphi.com> wrote:

>Of course, you could be talking about something I somehow missed
>but the only 6800 Basic published on a record I ever came
>across was Robert Uiterwyk's 4K 6800 Basic which Interface Age
>Magazine included in their May 1977 issue as their first "Floppy ROM".
>The record manufacturer was Eva-Tone Soundsheets of Deerfield, Ill.
>which normally used their flexible record technology to produce
>short "music samplers".  They were not the instigators of the Floppy
>ROM however, it was the magazine which just used Eva-Tone's technology.
>Chris

I'm not surprised you missed it, because it wasn't out long.  Format
was KC Standard Phillips Compact Cassette.

######

From: genew@vip.net (Gene Wirchenko)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Fri, 02 Jan 1998 20:25:51 GMT
Organization: All USENET -- http://www.Supernews.com
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Charles Richmond <richmond@plano.net> wrote:

>Benjamin Robinson wrote:
>> This reminds me of a neat trick one could do with Atari BASIC.  You could
>> interrupt a program, change the source code, and then continue from where
>> you left off.  With most other BASICs, that I'm aware of, you couldn't do
>> this because when your source code expanded, it would overwrite your
>> variables.  I'm not sure how Atari implemented its BASIC, but code and data
>> were organized so that they would not interefere with one another.
>> 
>It seems like this should work with BASICA and GW-BASIC, because they used one
>64k segment for the program and another 64k segment for the data. So expanding

     No, they used one segment for both.

>the source could *not* destroy the data segment (at least if the segments were
>set up to be disjoint, and I think they always were.) In fact, when I took a
>course that included BASIC programming years ago, one of the selling points
>for BASIC was that you could stop the running program, change values of
>variables, and then continue the program.

     Change variable values, yes, but changing the program is
something else.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

C Pronunciation Guide:
     y=x++;     "wye equals ex plus plus semicolon"
     x=x++;     "ex equals ex doublecross semicolon"

######

From: Michael Kircher <kircher@jupiter.ph-cip.uni-koeln.de>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 03 Jan 1998 16:55:17 +0100
Organization: CipLab - Institutes for Physics, University of Cologne, Germany
Lines: 26
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genew@vip.net (Gene Wirchenko) writes:

>      Microsoft BASIC version 4.
>      ^^^^^^^^^
> 
>      Commodore had their own version numbers for their BASIC.  2 and 4
> of theirs are the ones I know about.  Commodore BASIC 2 was
> cassette-based and 4 was disk-based.

BASIC 1.x was released with the PET.

BASIC 2.0 was built into VIC 20 and C 64 series.

BASIC 4.0 was an enhanced version, that featured easier access to
disc drives. It was released with the 600 and 700 series.

BASIC 3.5 added graphics commands, released with the C 16, C 116, +4
series. It really should have been called Ver. 4.5.

BASIC 7.0 was released with the C 128.

They were all ROM-based.

Greetings,

  Michael

######

From: genew@vip.net (Gene Wirchenko)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 1998 22:06:51 GMT
Organization: All USENET -- http://www.Supernews.com
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Michael Kircher <kircher@jupiter.ph-cip.uni-koeln.de> wrote:

>genew@vip.net (Gene Wirchenko) writes:
>
>>      Microsoft BASIC version 4.
>>      ^^^^^^^^^
>> 
>>      Commodore had their own version numbers for their BASIC.  2 and 4
>> of theirs are the ones I know about.  Commodore BASIC 2 was
>> cassette-based and 4 was disk-based.

     "cassette-based" and "disk-based" refer to their emphasis.

>BASIC 1.x was released with the PET.
>
>BASIC 2.0 was built into VIC 20 and C 64 series.

     It was around before then.  4 was around before then, too.

>BASIC 4.0 was an enhanced version, that featured easier access to
>disc drives. It was released with the 600 and 700 series.
>
>BASIC 3.5 added graphics commands, released with the C 16, C 116, +4
>series. It really should have been called Ver. 4.5.
>
>BASIC 7.0 was released with the C 128.
>
>They were all ROM-based.

     They were all STORED in ROM.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

C Pronunciation Guide:
     y=x++;     "wye equals ex plus plus semicolon"
     x=x++;     "ex equals ex doublecross semicolon"

######

From: cbh@REMOVE_THIS.teabag.demon.co.uk (Chris Hedley)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 5 Jan 1998 17:15:50 GMT
Organization: teabag
Message-ID: <68r4g6$23q$9@teabag.demon.co.uk>
References: <882584410@k-line.org> <34A0B265.1D0741F6@uNwOaStPeArMloo.ca>
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In article <683lm1$i6m$1@sue.cc.uregina.ca>,
	bayko@borealis.cs.uregina.ca (John  Bayko) writes:
>     Microsoft Basics didn't have graphics commands before the TRS-80
> Color Computer - the GW-BASIC graphics commands were taken pretty much
> directly from Color Basic. I believe pretty much all other Color Basic
> statements showed up in GW-BASIC, except very specific ones dealing
> with the CoCo's graphics hardware.

Talking of the version of BASIC used on the Tandy Colo(u)r, the Dragon 32/64
also used the same version (we'll not get into the debate as to whether or
not it was a copy of the Tandy, it's been overdone and I've not yet seen
anyone agree on it!) but, in the case of the latter, apparently the disc-
based system offered an entirely different version of BASIC.  Anybody know
anything about it?  I remember reading some vague articles back when the
machine was in vogue (must be about 16 or 17 years ago now) but never had
a chance to try it out owing to the exhorbitant price of the disc hardware,
which was in the region of 3 times the price of the main system unit IIRC!
This add-on opened up a number of avenues leading to various different OS'
being available, again IIRC things like Flex and OS/9, as well as a
proprietary OS, all with their own BASICs and other interesting stuff.
Anybody remember anything about them?  Anybody out there actually USED them?
Perhaps I should take another look at the emulator, to see if there's been
updates so that it'll handle the disc system.  Whether the copyrights of
any of the software I've mentioned have been rescinded to allow general
distribution is anyone's guess, though.

I also seem to remember talk of a Dragon 128, which appeared after the
rights to the company name had been sold at least half a dozen times, but
other than comments about the thing's existance, I know very little about
it or any BASIC it might have supported.

Chris.

######

From: cbh@REMOVE_THIS.teabag.demon.co.uk (Chris Hedley)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 5 Jan 1998 21:35:11 GMT
Organization: teabag
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In article <34A7F438.7224B274@plano.net>,
	Charles Richmond <richmond@plano.net> writes:
> course that included BASIC programming years ago, one of the selling points
> for BASIC was that you could stop the running program, change values of
> variables, and then continue the program.

Ah yes, I remember doing that to cheat at some games written in BASIC in
the early '80s.  :)

Chris.

######

From: cbh@REMOVE_THIS.teabag.demon.co.uk (Chris Hedley)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 5 Jan 1998 21:37:11 GMT
Organization: teabag
Message-ID: <68rjq7$ad4$4@teabag.demon.co.uk>
References: <882584410@k-line.org> <349cc0ac.164174615@news.xmission.com>
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    <34a56789.0@comnet.co.nz>
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In article <34a56789.0@comnet.co.nz>,
	gmiller@inca.co.nz (Gaven Miller) writes:
><topic-drift>
> 
> What did the "GW" in "GW Basic" stand for?
> 
></topic-drift>

This has already cropped up several times, but just in case you haven't
already spotted it, it reputedly stands for "Gee Whizz."  That factlet
alone would be enough to stop me using it.

Chris.

######

From: "George Gray" <Georgeg175@AOL.COM>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 1998 23:07:38 -0500
Organization: Bell Atlantic Internet Solutions
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>You can get VB5 control creation edition for free (it has been
>downloadable from microsoft's site, but I don't know if it still is).
You can still get it.

>What you _don't_ get with it, is the collection of Activex controls
>tht comes with the full-fledged VB: you're limited to the basic
>controls like buttons, textboxes and the like.
You CAN add controls to your project.  You cannot, however, copy the
controls from a friends copy of VB5 and try to develop with them...the
license file is different.  You can, however, add third party controls and
you can use controls created with VBCCE.

######

From: "George Gray" <Georgeg175@AOL.COM>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 1998 23:11:47 -0500
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Michael Kircher wrote in message ...
>>      Commodore had their own version numbers for their BASIC. ...
>BASIC 1.x was released with the PET.
.
.
.
>BASIC 7.0 was released with the C 128.
>
>They were all ROM-based.
They were STILL developed by Microsoft.

######

From: "George Gray" <Georgeg175@AOL.COM>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 1998 23:23:28 -0500
Organization: Bell Atlantic Internet Solutions
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>>I don't know what 'standards' people are talking about, but AppleSoft has
The 'standards' we are referring to are a set of keywords that Microsoft
settled on instead of having to support different keyword sets for the
various versions of MS Basic at the time.  An example of this would be the
PSET, PRESET, LINE and PLAY keywords.  All except for PLAY (there were more)
handled graphics while PLAY handled sound.  You could, with little or no
change, use the same source on different machines.  For example, I wrote a
little shoot-em-game in TRS-80 Extended Color Basic and then implemented the
game on an early IBM XT clone with GW-BASIC.  The source ran with only a
minor change to handle a difference in screen size.  I believe the keyword
set was part of an international standard (like ANSI) that appeared in the
early '80s.  I forget the name.  Microsoft also released subsets that were
designed for less capable machines like the Tandy MC-10, the Mattell
Aquarious and some little computer that was made by Sony.  (The Aquarious
was interesting in that it had a CP/M ROM cartridge, but no disk drives.  I
think Mattell threw in the towel before the disks were released.)  The
Coleco ADAM also used Microsoft Basic, but it was Applesoft compatible so it
did not include the 'standard' keyword set but used the 'HPLOT', 'HLIN' and
so on.  (it had that unreliable and funky tape thingy too!)

That's my little history lesson for today...

######

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 6 Jan 1998 11:01:30 +0100
Message-ID: <peterk.1b8q@combo.ganesha.com>
From: peterk@combo.ganesha.com (Dr. Peter Kittel)
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Reply-To: peterk @ combo.ganesha.com
References: <882584410@k-line.org> <34a7eec2.11423362@news.vip.net> <v9wbtxtpn6i.fsf@jupiter.ph-cip.Uni-Koeln.DE>
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In article <v9wbtxtpn6i.fsf@jupiter.ph-cip.Uni-Koeln.DE> Michael Kircher <kircher@jupiter.ph-cip.uni-koeln.de> writes:
>genew@vip.net (Gene Wirchenko) writes:
>
>>      Microsoft BASIC version 4.
>>      ^^^^^^^^^
>> 
>>      Commodore had their own version numbers for their BASIC.  2 and 4
>> of theirs are the ones I know about.  Commodore BASIC 2 was
>> cassette-based and 4 was disk-based.
>
>BASIC 1.x was released with the PET.

There was a whole family of PETs. The 2001 and (CBM) 30xx came
with BASIC 1.x.

>BASIC 2.0 was built into VIC 20 and C 64 series.

And into the CBM 40xx and 8xxx.

>BASIC 4.0 was an enhanced version, that featured easier access to
>disc drives. It was released with the 600 and 700 series.
>
>BASIC 3.5 added graphics commands, released with the C 16, C 116, +4
>series. It really should have been called Ver. 4.5.
>
>BASIC 7.0 was released with the C 128.
>
>They were all ROM-based.

Correct.

-- 
Best Regards, Dr. Peter Kittel       // http://www.pios.de of PIOS
Private Site in Frankfurt, Germany \X/  office: peterk @ pios.de
Still big newsfeed problems causing long delays.

######

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Tue, 6 Jan 1998 14:01:11 +0100
Message-ID: <peterk.1b9k@combo.ganesha.com>
From: peterk@combo.ganesha.com (Dr. Peter Kittel)
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Reply-To: peterk @ combo.ganesha.com
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In article <34A35754.771DB5D1@plano.net> Charles Richmond <richmond@plano.net> writes:
>
>Also I think that I have *some* insight into the string area garbage
>collection (GC). (Someone *please* correct me if I go off into the weeds.)

I'll try to add a few cents. Let me first say that my experiences
below with MS Basics stem from the Commodore PET 2001 to CBM 8032
computers and their Basic versions.

>A string variable in Microsoft BASIC consisted of a hunk of memory containing
>a length for the string and a pointer to where the characters were stored in
>the string area.

Or to put it differently: In the memory area trailing the program text,
you found entries for real and integer variables together with their
contents, but for string variables you only found pointers (plus one
byte with the string length, so it was 255 chars maximum), while the
string contents was placed in the top of the free memory area, growing
down towards the program text and variable space.

> Strings in the string area were atomic--i.e., they were 
>*never* changed. If you built a new string an assigned it to a variable, the
>new string was created in free memory from the string area. The old string of
>characters in the string area would be left in tact.

Yes.

>Only *one* copy of a string was stored in the string area. If two string
>variables had the exact same characters, their pointers would point to the
>*same* string in the string area.

Hmm, I'm not sure about this. What can be also mentioned is, if
you have some assignment in the program like A$="Text", the pointer
to the string data will point to this place in the program text, so
that this string does not appear in the string variable space.

> Eventually some of the strings of characters
>in the string area would have *no* string variables pointing to them. During
>garbage collection, these strings of characters were removed, the remaining
>strings were compacted to leave the free memory as one block, and *all* the
>pointers in the string variables adjusted to point to the new location of
>their characters in the string area. GC would be caused by the inablility to
>allocated enough memory from the string area to support the current
>operation--or by being forced by a call to FRE("").

Yes. Ok, on these Basic versions, it was FRE(0).

>I assume that the reason the older BASIC's would "sit and think" during GC and
>the newer BASIC's do *not* "sit and think"--must be that the newer BASIC's do
>incremental garbage collection.

No, they do it just a bit more intelligently, but also need some more
memory for this. I mentioned some details above to help in explanation:

To do GC in an old Basic (BASIC 1.x like found in PET 2001 and CBM 30xx),
the interpreter first had to sort all string pointers in the lower variable
area after their address value, so that it then could walk this list of
pointers down from top of memory to the end of string space. Looking
at the stored size of the string, it could find out which memory area
was unused and overwrite that. What took so much time was the sorting.
And as there was no space to store the sorted list of pointers (remember
GC had to take place in an out of memory condition), this was done on
the fly, scanning the whole variables list the square number of times
as strings were found in that list.

Newer Basic versions (from BASIC 2.0 up on those Commodore machines)
stored not only the string contents in that upper area, but also a
back pointer down into the variable list, where the according descriptor
was stored, plus again its size. When a string became invalid, that back
pointer was zeroed out and thus easily recognizable. So the GC only had
to do a single loop (not a squared, nested one) through the upper string
area, find invalid strings and move any string contents below that up,
of course while updating all those forward and backward pointers.

I did a rather ambitious text editor on the PET back then, which stored
the text as an array of line strings. In the old Basic versions, this
led to GC times of several minutes, under the newer ones, the cursor
just stumbled a bit for a blink of an eye. Yeah, the wonders of 8-bit,
1 MHz computing, where the Basic interpreter *was* the OS :-).

-- 
Best Regards, Dr. Peter Kittel       // http://www.pios.de of PIOS
Private Site in Frankfurt, Germany \X/  office: peterk @ pios.de
Still big newsfeed problems causing long delays.

######

From: Karthik Sheka <kpsheka1537@pol.net>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Tue, 06 Jan 1998 19:53:17 -0500
Organization: Physicians Online (via bigfoot.com)
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<HTML>
Benjamin Robinson wrote:
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE>[...]
<BR>This reminds me of a neat trick one could do with Atari BASIC.&nbsp;
You could
<BR>interrupt a program, change the source code, and then continue from
where
<BR>you left off.&nbsp; With most other BASICs, that I'm aware of, you
couldn't do
<BR>this because when your source code expanded, it would overwrite your
<BR>variables.&nbsp; I'm not sure how Atari implemented its BASIC, but
code and data
<BR>were organized so that they would not interefere with one another.

<P>(On the other hand, Atari BASIC didn't support string arrays.&nbsp;
Nobody's
<BR>perfect...)</BLOCKQUOTE>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Reminds me of programming on the Commodore 64.&nbsp;
One trick I often used to modify a program was to&nbsp; POKE data into
the keyboard buffer (usually&nbsp; to move the cursor to the upper left
hand corner of the screen and press enter a few times), change the forground
color to the same as the background color, and print out the lines I wanted
to add to the program followed by a run &lt;Insert line number here> command.&nbsp;
Then I would stop the program and let the keyboard buffer take over...&nbsp;
This allowed me to have self-modifying code.

<P>Can't beat the C64 for this kind of stuff. :-)

<P>//Bobby</HTML>

######

From: cpierce1@cp500.fsic.ford.com (Clinton Pierce)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 6 Jan 1998 21:09:21 GMT
Organization: Ford Motor Company
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Gene Wirchenko <genew@vip.net> wrote:
>
>     That was your error in using FP.  As .1 can't be represented
>exactly internally, you have round-off errors.  It would have been
>better to code as
>          for ib=-10 to 10
>          i=ib/10
>
>[snip]
>
>Sincerely,
>Gene Wirchenko

Doesn't this blow up after 10 repetitions?  

	i=0/10          

Kinda looks like a divide by Zero to me...unless those old micros
found a way to do that.   :-)

-- 
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Clinton A. Pierce    |   "If you rush a Miracle Man,   | http://www.  |
|  cpierce1@ford.com    |     you get rotten miracles"    | dcicorp.com/ |
| fubar@ameritech.net   |--Miracle Max, The Princess Bride| ~clintp      |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
GCSd-s+:+a-C++UALIS++++P+++L++E---t++X+b+++DI++++G++e+>++h----r+++y+++>y*

######

From: lucvdv@null.net (Luc Van der Veken)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Tue, 06 Jan 1998 22:20:35 GMT
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On Fri, 02 Jan 1998 20:25:51 GMT, genew@vip.net (Gene Wirchenko) told
the world, or rather subsection alt.folklore.computers of it, that:

> Charles Richmond <richmond@plano.net> wrote:
> 
> >It seems like this should work with BASICA and GW-BASIC, because they used one
> >64k segment for the program and another 64k segment for the data. So expanding
> 
>      No, they used one segment for both.

IIRC, Charles was right. They were two separate segments. Or am I
wrong too, and was that Qbasic?

> >the source could *not* destroy the data segment (at least if the segments were
> >set up to be disjoint, and I think they always were.) In fact, when I took a
> >course that included BASIC programming years ago, one of the selling points
> >for BASIC was that you could stop the running program, change values of
> >variables, and then continue the program.
> 
>      Change variable values, yes, but changing the program is
> something else.

Sounds much like what any [good] debugger will let you do in a C
program.

But all basics I remember working in *would* let you change the source
(with certain limitations), just like it still does (VB).

[Deviating a bit, but maybe good for a "back to the C's" thread:]

The only C environment I remember let you do that, was a C interpreter
I once found somewhere (now what was it's fscking name again?)

I don't even remember whether it was on my last TRS80 or my first PC
clone that I tried it out, and then dumped it: the complexity of C
programming, at a speed slower than a good basic.

I thought about using it to "pre-test" some code before compiling, but
dropped that idea too because its implementation of the run-time
libraries was just a little too different from what my compiler gave
me.

-- 
The address in the "from" field is a real address, used as a spambox.
Mail there may be read, or it may not.
If you want to be sure, replace the domain by innet.be

######

From: butting@cs.waikato.ac.nz (Bryce Utting)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 7 Jan 1998 00:16:30 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Department
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Clinton Pierce (cpierce1@cp500.fsic.ford.com) wrote:
>Doesn't this blow up after 10 repetitions?  
>
>	i=0/10          
>
>Kinda looks like a divide by Zero to me...unless those old micros
>found a way to do that.   :-)

IDNTIMWYTIM.


butting (divides by ten up to seven times a day)

-- 
Bryce Utting                          http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~butting

                the cross before me, the world behind me
                             no turning back

######

From: krueger@cs.umn.edu (Alan Krueger)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 7 Jan 1998 01:22:01 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Department, University of Minnesota
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In article <68u6i1$7b91@eccws1.dearborn.ford.com>,
Clinton Pierce <cpierce1@cp500.fsic.ford.com> wrote:
> Gene Wirchenko <genew@vip.net> wrote:
[...]
> >          for ib=-10 to 10
> >          i=ib/10
[...]
> 
> Doesn't this blow up after 10 repetitions?  
> 
> 	i=0/10          
> 
> Kinda looks like a divide by Zero to me...unless those old micros
> found a way to do that.   :-)

Look again.  It's not division BY zero, but OF zero.

--
 W. Alan Krueger  |      http://www.cs.umn.edu/~krueger/home.cgi
 Graduate Student |------  Free Speech Wins!   http://www.ciec.org/  ------
 CSci Department  |  Support the anti-spam bill - http://www.cauce.org
 U of Minnesota   | Join the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email

######

From: cpierce1@cp500.fsic.ford.com (Clinton Pierce)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 7 Jan 1998 14:40:36 GMT
Organization: Ford Motor Company
Lines: 26
Message-ID: <690454$7ne3@eccws1.dearborn.ford.com>
References: <882584410@k-line.org> <67v0fk$bv8$1@sue.cc.uregina.ca>
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In article <68ulbp$a2d@epx.cis.umn.edu>,
	krueger@cs.umn.edu (Alan Krueger) writes:
>In article <68u6i1$7b91@eccws1.dearborn.ford.com>,
>Clinton Pierce <cpierce1@cp500.fsic.ford.com> wrote:
>> Gene Wirchenko <genew@vip.net> wrote:
>[...]
>> >          for ib=-10 to 10
>> >          i=ib/10
>[...]
>> 
>> Doesn't this blow up after 10 repetitions?  
>> 
>> 	i=0/10          
>> 
>> Kinda looks like a divide by Zero to me...unless those old micros
>> found a way to do that.   :-)
>
>Look again.  It's not division BY zero, but OF zero.
>

Didja ever have one of those days?  (It made an effective troll, though.)


Dyslexics of the world, untie!

######

From: hello@there.com (Rod Pinna)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Followup-To: alt.folklore.computers
Date: Thu, 08 Jan 1998 05:41:13 GMT
Organization: UWA
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cbh@REMOVE_THIS.teabag.demon.co.uk (Chris Hedley) wrote:

>being available, again IIRC things like Flex and OS/9, as well as a
>proprietary OS, all with their own BASICs and other interesting stuff.
>Anybody remember anything about them?  Anybody out there actually USED them?

I used OS-9, which was a real time commercial quality OS released by 
Mircoware. It still lives today (or did recently at least) as OS-9000 
for 68k CPUs. It has also been ported to Intel boxes. One of those 
operating systems used for controller applications. 

One thing that came with OS/9 was Basic-09. This allowed you to to 
have functions and procedures, just like Pascal, and did away with the 
line numbers.

And there was also Multi-Vue, which was a windowing add-on to OS-9 
Level 2, which allowed you to use unlimited memory. The Tandy hardware 
supported up to 512k (CoCo 3) but later people have got it up to 4M I 
believe.

The proprietary OS was, I think, StarDos. Came with a hardware 
expansion thing as well as software.

>Perhaps I should take another look at the emulator, to see if there's been
>updates so that it'll handle the disc system.  Whether the copyrights of
>any of the software I've mentioned have been rescinded to allow general
>distribution is anyone's guess, though.

I doubt OS-9 has.


Rod Pinna
(rpinnaX@XcivilX.uwa.edu.au  Remove the X for email)

######

From: Robert Billing <unclebob@tnglwood.demon.co.uk>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Thu, 08 Jan 98 08:20:21 GMT
Message-ID: <884247621snz@tnglwood.demon.co.uk>
References: <882584410@k-line.org> <67v0fk$bv8$1@sue.cc.uregina.ca> <68u6i1$7b91@eccws1.dearborn.ford.com>
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In article <68u6i1$7b91@eccws1.dearborn.ford.com>
           cpierce1@cp500.fsic.ford.com "Clinton Pierce" writes:

>         i=0/10          
> 
> Kinda looks like a divide by Zero to me...unless those old micros
> found a way to do that.   :-)

 Well, it looked more like a divide by ten to me, but I could be
wrong...

-- 
I am Robert Billing, Christian, inventor, traveller, cook and animal
lover, I live near 0:46W 51:22N.  http://www.tnglwood.demon.co.uk/
"Bother," said Pooh, "Eeyore, ready two photon torpedoes and lock
phasers on the Heffalump, Piglet, meet me in transporter room three"

######

From: lucvdv@null.net (Luc Van der Veken)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Thu, 08 Jan 1998 19:12:02 GMT
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On Tue, 06 Jan 1998 19:53:17 -0500, Karthik Sheka
<kpsheka1537@pol.net> told the world, or rather subsection
alt.folklore.computers of it, that:

> [HTML attachment (C) netscape]

<flame>
Can you try to say that in words instead of drawing it, please?
I don't have netscape, you see (and I don't read news with a web
browser anyway).
</flame>

-- 
The address in the "from" field is a real address, used as a spambox.
Mail there may be read, or it may not.
If you want to be sure, replace the domain by innet.be

######

From: "George Gray" <Georgeg175@AOL.COM>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: Sat, 10 Jan 1998 16:40:42 -0500
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.....
>> Personally, I wish SmartBASIC had used Microsoft BASIC file I/O
>> syntax instead of the dreadful PRINT CHR$(4) escape sequence business--
>
> Then it would not have run AppleSoft and Apple DOS 3.x programs.
>
> Can't have it both ways - unfortunately! <B-(  'Twould have been nice,
>however, to get BOTH capabilities.
AH! It did NOT run Apple DOS 3.x programs, only AppleSoft.  The
pple ][ used the 650x microp while the Adam used the Z-80.  Different and
incompatible microprocessors.  And it did not run ALL AppleSoft programs,
only those that did not use any PEEK or POKE statements to control the
Apple ][ hardware (i.e. graphics that could not be done with the built in
statements (like sprite-type graphics.))

######

From: "Giles Hedgecock" <xwv00@dial.pipex.com>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: back to the BASICS
Date: 11 Jan 1998 17:21:40 GMT
Organization: UUNET
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O.K.


Godfather


Chris Hedley <cbh@REMOVE_THIS.teabag.demon.co.uk> wrote in article
<68rjq7$ad4$4@teabag.demon.co.uk>...
> In article <34a56789.0@comnet.co.nz>,
> 	gmiller@inca.co.nz (Gaven Miller) writes:
> ><topic-drift>
> > 
> > What did the "GW" in "GW Basic" stand for?
> > 
> ></topic-drift>
> 
> This has already cropped up several times, but just in case you haven't
> already spotted it, it reputedly stands for "Gee Whizz."  That factlet
> alone would be enough to stop me using it.
> 
> Chris.
>