Altair BASIC and Early Microcomputers
The Altair BASIC interpreter was developed by Microsoft founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates with help from Monte Davidoff, using a self made Intel 8080 software simulator running on a PDP-10 minicomputer. The dialect of BASIC was similar to Digital Equipment Corporation interpreters, especially in string operations, which varied between BASIC implementations. BASIC used dynamically allocated strings which stored their size. Early BASIC only supported single letter and digit names, but Microsoft BASIC supported long variable names. Only two characters were significant though; AD, ADDRESS1, and ADDRESS2 would all point to the same value. The runtime symbol table used a linear search so that a program which used many distinct variables would run much slower than a program which used a single array for all its variables.
It was delivered on paper tape and in its original version took 4 KB of memory. The extended 8 KB version was then generalized into BASIC-80 (8080/85, Z80), and ported into BASIC-68 (6800), BASIC-69 (6809), and MOS Technology 6502-BASIC (unfortunately spilling over to 9 KB, in an era when 8 KB ROM chips were standard), as well as the 16-bit BASIC-86 (8086/88). It was ideal for ROM-based computers since it did not require an editor (each line requires a number), nor a disk drive to store object code or linked executable. It was less sophisticated than software for industrial desktop computers, which had dedicated keys to load, store, and keys for editing within a line and debugging, but personal computer pricing, in contrast, started at $1,565, not $7,000.
Read more about this topic: Microsoft BASIC
Famous quotes containing the words basic and/or early:
“The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practicised. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“[In early adolescence] she becomes acutely aware of herself as a being perceived by others, judged by others, though she herself is the harshest judge, quick to list her physical flaws, quick to undervalue and under-rate herself not only in terms of physical appearance but across a wide range of talents, capacities and even social status, whereas boys of the same age will cite their abilities, their talents and their social status pretty accurately.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)