a Básica binary implementation which was used in PC clones and eventually in all PC compatibles, IBM or not.īesides BASIC falling somewhat out of fashion with the development in capabilities of home computers, in the PC environment, the Borland utilities with their compilation speed and integrated IDE and single-step debugger where a major reason for people to start migrating to Pascal and C. QuickBASIC became Visual Basic, VBA and VB.NET: the last two are still in common use today.Īs BASICA only lived on ROM, to be pedantic, GW-BASIC superseded it firstly. Variables didn't require type characters for non-integers, and structures were introduced and arrays could change their starting index.įlow control was completely overhauled, allowing for more than GOTO, FOR.NEXT, and WHILE.WEND. The requirement for line numbers was removed: you didn't have to RENUM your program every time you made changes.įunctions and subroutines became first-class citizens, with formal parameters and less of an ad hoc feel to them. The editor was far superior in every way (at least I thought so!) Microsoft had essentially ceased further development of GW-BASIC when they changed their focus to compiled BASIC in the mid-1980's: note that GW-BASIC never got VGA support, and Microsoft replaced it with QBASIC (a stripped-down version of QuickBASIC with just the interpreter) in MS-DOS 5+.Īs to why QBASIC became more popular, I can think of several reasons: In my view, QuickBASIC caused the demise of GW-BASIC/BASIC(A).
Hobbyists became a much smaller segment of the market, and obtaining a run-time or development environment for a new machine became just another software choice. The new question wasn't whether the new machine supports BASIC rather, whether it was "PC Compatible" or not. Likewise, imagine how little market share a new web browser could hope to attain without Javascript support.Īs things progressed through the 1980s, the reliance on a built-in BASIC run-time for compatibility with existing software turned to reliance on IBM PC compatibility.
If the machine gained a decent market share, then more professional software would follow and the reliance on BASIC would slowly fade, but it was an essential ingredient for the early adopters of the new hardware. This made the machines exceptionally useful for hobbyists and budding programmers, and marginally useful for everyone else. By providing a BASIC run-time in the firmware, the early home computers were instantly programmable and had access to a large body of relatively portable software previously written in BASIC. That is what BASIC was back then.ĭuring the home computer revolution of the 1980s, every new system had to at least have a viable claim to be useful for something in terms of software. In my view, the brief popularity of BASIC in the 1980s is directly related to the popularity of Javascript today - Simply, it's the Runtime that is Everywhere.
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