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While this isn’t your father’s Microsoft, this is your grandfather’s Microsoft. Before they started creating business applications and operating systems, Micro
by RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
While this isn’t your father’s Microsoft, this is your grandfather’s Microsoft.
Before they started creating business applications and operating systems, Microsoft was in the business of programming tools. Their first software was Microsoft Basic. Microsoft Basic was available on pretty much every major personal computer platform.
Thus in some sense this is Microsoft returning to its roots as a cross-platform programming tools company.
- jchw 7y agoTo be fair, Microsoft Basic practically was an operating system, in its day. It’s what many computers booted into, and sometimes the environment in which everything else was run from.
- jojo14 7y agoTo be fair BASIC was not much of a deal. The interpreter is just a REPL. Very basic at it, hence the name. The BASIC was not invented by MS: they replicated it. The real operating system part was done by computer manufacturers. For instance it was Dragon Data that brought the "kind of" OS routines in the Dragon32. Floppy disk managment, I/O, etc. MS just brought the REPL and ... bugs.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> BASIC was not much of a deal. The interpreter is just a REPL. Very basic at it, hence the name. The language is named after its goal of being something easy to learn. It is a fairly contrived acronym, Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.