I thought so as well, so I decided to Google it: QBasic was intended as a replacement for GW-BASIC. It was based on the earlier QuickBASIC 4.5 compiler but

I thought so as well, so I decided to Google it: QBasic was intended as a replacement for GW-BASIC. It was based on the earlier QuickBASIC 4.5 compiler but without QuickBASIC's compiler and linker elements. So, from this, QBasic was not able to generate .EXE's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic