7 ms·

Create your own Version of Microsoft BASIC for 6502

97 points by mattowen_uk 10y ago

janwillemb 10y ago
Slightly off-topic: My mother decided that she had to learn about this computer stuff too, now that her children were so involved in it. This was in the late 80's. So she grabbed the manual and started 'computering'. Turned out she took the BASIC manual by accident. After a while she had a small program running that printed some numbers on the screen, but she had no idea why she had to do this or what use this program had. In the end she's still the computer-person of my parental pair.
- bsharitt 10y ago
  >Turned out she took the BASIC manual by accident. "Hrm, BASIC. This must be about the basics of computers, sounds like a good place to start."
  - csixty4 10y ago
    "I read the manual on all the DOS, where's the book with all the DON'TS?"
forgottenacc57 10y ago
How much money would Microsoft have been paid for basic for a given machine?
- bostand 10y ago
  Somewhere between 500 and 2000 usd for the complete port? (based on an old apple story about Jobs vs Woz)
- vidarh 10y ago
  According to "Commodore: A company on the edge" by Brian Bagnall, Jack Tramiel (then CEO of Commodore) stated that Gates originally offered royalties of $3 per copy, but Tramiel claims he answered "I'm already married" and offered to purchase it outright for $25,000 (some sources give lower numbers). The license allowed Commodore to make improvements, but did not give Commodore any improvements Microsoft made - people like Bob Yannes at Commodore at the time thinks Microsoft basically assumed Commodore would come back asking for upgrades, and pay them more money, but Tramiel was famously tight with money. In the end, had Gates managed to get $3 per copy, the C64 alone would have resulted in somewhere between $45m and $60m of income for Microsoft at a time when that actually was a lot of money for them. I believe it was first when they did the Commodore 128 that Commodore negotiated a new deal with them.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    And that that point Tramiel was running Atari...
  - cmrdporcupine 10y ago
    The Tramiels were notorious for not caring about software infrastructure, compatibility, and maintenance, to their customer's detriment. I'm not sure of the details of the deal that Tramiel's Atari Corp signed with Digital Research when they licensed and ported GEM (a Mac/Lisa-like GUI framework) and GEMDOS (a spawn of CP/M 68k) for the Atari ST -- but after the initial port it never received any improvements from DR, though Atari themselves made some relatively minor changes and bug fixes later. But it was a potentially very good operating system that failed to improve significantly until it was too late (Atari hired the author of and acquired a set of open source Unix-like extensions in the early 90s, but by then the writing was on the wall for the platform.)
ashread123 10y ago
i think its an awesome story when you hear a hacker break in and steal some info. i can tell you how to hire one for your personal needs....cyber issues, other internet issues. identity issues,....19193076946 or more details on this or email darkwebsolutions /at/ hackermail /dot/ com
bostand 10y ago
So my first steps into the programming world was guided by Bill Gates?
- bhaak 10y ago
  So was mine, although a little more indirectly. With AmigaBASIC 1.2 from MicroSoft but probably without any input from Bill Gates. My first programming session involved changing the parameters of a ellipse drawing routine. Which was AFAIR from a programming tutorial that was part of the manual.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    And AmigaBASIC was part of cementing Microsoft-hate amongst Amiga users early on. It's famously buggy and slow. One of the bugs involved hacky use of the top 8-bit of pointers to store flags - this worked on 68000 CPU's as thy only had a 24 bit address bus and ignored the rest, but would cause crashes on machines with faster CPUs/accelerators (there are patches, but AmigaBASIC was dropped for later AmigaOS releases anyway) > My first programming session involved changing the parameters of a ellipse drawing routine. Which was AFAIR from a programming tutorial that was part of the manual. This is one of the Commodore traditions I really miss: The manuals tended to start with programming, and also included fairly detailed schematics. I know many other home computers did this, but I think Commodore with the Amiga is one of the ones that persisted with it the longest, and were most systematic about it. The VIC-20 manual I think is one of the best early examples of this approach [1], where the manual starters with programming right after showing how to unpack and connect the computer. [1] https://archive.org/details/Personal_Computing_On_The_VIC-20_1982_Commodore https://archive.org/details/Personal_Computing_On_The_VIC-20...
    - cmrdporcupine 10y ago
      Yeah it's interesting that both Atari and Commodore dropped the ball on the BASIC options for their 16-bit machines introduced at the same time. ST BASIC was also crappy, and it wasn't until later that better third party options became available (GFA BASIC was really good, as was HiSoft BASIC, but both came later). In large part the C64 and Apple II had their success because it was easy for owners to make the transition from hobbyist to programmer by starting with the built-in BASIC and just working up. BASIC was right there in front of you, always accessible, and you basically _had_ to learn it to use the machine. So it created a ready supply of new content producers. To program the ST effectively you really needed a C compiler, but of course back in those days that was not cheap at all or even readily available (or very fun on a machine with no hard drive, which was the common situation.) I can't help but wonder if those platforms could have had better success if they'd just shipped out of the box with a decent BASIC, an assembler, and maybe even a C compiler. Or at least had that available on launch day for a price accessible to hobbyists.
Shalhoub 10y ago
"Ric Weiland, Bill Gates and Monte Davidoff at Microsoft wrote MOS 6502 BASIC" as copied from the source code for BASIC for a PDP-8 .. http://www.voteview.com/gates.htm http://www.voteview.com/gates.htm http://thebeezspeaks.blogspot.co.uk/2007/07/hasta-la-vista-part-1-microsofts-final.html http://thebeezspeaks.blogspot.co.uk/2007/07/hasta-la-vista-p...

97 points by mattowen_uk 10y ago

Slightly off-topic: My mother decided that she had to learn about this computer stuff too, now that her children were so involved in it. This was in the late 80's. So she grabbed the manual and started 'computering'. Turned out she took the BASIC manual by accident. After a while she had a small program running that printed some numbers on the screen, but she had no idea why she had to do this or what use this program had. In the end she's still the computer-person of my parental pair.

bsharitt 10y ago
>Turned out she took the BASIC manual by accident. "Hrm, BASIC. This must be about the basics of computers, sounds like a good place to start."
- csixty4 10y ago
  "I read the manual on all the DOS, where's the book with all the DON'TS?"

forgottenacc57 10y ago

How much money would Microsoft have been paid for basic for a given machine?

bostand 10y ago
Somewhere between 500 and 2000 usd for the complete port? (based on an old apple story about Jobs vs Woz)
vidarh 10y ago
According to "Commodore: A company on the edge" by Brian Bagnall, Jack Tramiel (then CEO of Commodore) stated that Gates originally offered royalties of $3 per copy, but Tramiel claims he answered "I'm already married" and offered to purchase it outright for $25,000 (some sources give lower numbers). The license allowed Commodore to make improvements, but did not give Commodore any improvements Microsoft made - people like Bob Yannes at Commodore at the time thinks Microsoft basically assumed Commodore would come back asking for upgrades, and pay them more money, but Tramiel was famously tight with money. In the end, had Gates managed to get $3 per copy, the C64 alone would have resulted in somewhere between $45m and $60m of income for Microsoft at a time when that actually was a lot of money for them. I believe it was first when they did the Commodore 128 that Commodore negotiated a new deal with them.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  And that that point Tramiel was running Atari...
- cmrdporcupine 10y ago
  The Tramiels were notorious for not caring about software infrastructure, compatibility, and maintenance, to their customer's detriment. I'm not sure of the details of the deal that Tramiel's Atari Corp signed with Digital Research when they licensed and ported GEM (a Mac/Lisa-like GUI framework) and GEMDOS (a spawn of CP/M 68k) for the Atari ST -- but after the initial port it never received any improvements from DR, though Atari themselves made some relatively minor changes and bug fixes later. But it was a potentially very good operating system that failed to improve significantly until it was too late (Atari hired the author of and acquired a set of open source Unix-like extensions in the early 90s, but by then the writing was on the wall for the platform.)

ashread123 10y ago

i think its an awesome story when you hear a hacker break in and steal some info. i can tell you how to hire one for your personal needs....cyber issues, other internet issues. identity issues,....19193076946 or more details on this or email darkwebsolutions /at/ hackermail /dot/ com

bostand 10y ago

So my first steps into the programming world was guided by Bill Gates?

bhaak 10y ago
So was mine, although a little more indirectly. With AmigaBASIC 1.2 from MicroSoft but probably without any input from Bill Gates. My first programming session involved changing the parameters of a ellipse drawing routine. Which was AFAIR from a programming tutorial that was part of the manual.
- vidarh 10y ago
  And AmigaBASIC was part of cementing Microsoft-hate amongst Amiga users early on. It's famously buggy and slow. One of the bugs involved hacky use of the top 8-bit of pointers to store flags - this worked on 68000 CPU's as thy only had a 24 bit address bus and ignored the rest, but would cause crashes on machines with faster CPUs/accelerators (there are patches, but AmigaBASIC was dropped for later AmigaOS releases anyway) > My first programming session involved changing the parameters of a ellipse drawing routine. Which was AFAIR from a programming tutorial that was part of the manual. This is one of the Commodore traditions I really miss: The manuals tended to start with programming, and also included fairly detailed schematics. I know many other home computers did this, but I think Commodore with the Amiga is one of the ones that persisted with it the longest, and were most systematic about it. The VIC-20 manual I think is one of the best early examples of this approach [1], where the manual starters with programming right after showing how to unpack and connect the computer. [1] https://archive.org/details/Personal_Computing_On_The_VIC-20_1982_Commodore https://archive.org/details/Personal_Computing_On_The_VIC-20...
  - cmrdporcupine 10y ago
    Yeah it's interesting that both Atari and Commodore dropped the ball on the BASIC options for their 16-bit machines introduced at the same time. ST BASIC was also crappy, and it wasn't until later that better third party options became available (GFA BASIC was really good, as was HiSoft BASIC, but both came later). In large part the C64 and Apple II had their success because it was easy for owners to make the transition from hobbyist to programmer by starting with the built-in BASIC and just working up. BASIC was right there in front of you, always accessible, and you basically _had_ to learn it to use the machine. So it created a ready supply of new content producers. To program the ST effectively you really needed a C compiler, but of course back in those days that was not cheap at all or even readily available (or very fun on a machine with no hard drive, which was the common situation.) I can't help but wonder if those platforms could have had better success if they'd just shipped out of the box with a decent BASIC, an assembler, and maybe even a C compiler. Or at least had that available on launch day for a price accessible to hobbyists.

Shalhoub 10y ago

"Ric Weiland, Bill Gates and Monte Davidoff at Microsoft wrote MOS 6502 BASIC" as copied from the source code for BASIC for a PDP-8 .. http://www.voteview.com/gates.htm http://www.voteview.com/gates.htm http://thebeezspeaks.blogspot.co.uk/2007/07/hasta-la-vista-part-1-microsofts-final.html http://thebeezspeaks.blogspot.co.uk/2007/07/hasta-la-vista-p...