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My mom's IBM 8088 had GW-BASIC built into its BIOS. You could turn on the computer and go straight into it without having any storage medium present.
by Newtonip 6y ago
My mom's IBM 8088 had GW-BASIC built into its BIOS. You could turn on the computer and go straight into it without having any storage medium present.
- hh2222 6y agoHave an original IBM PC sitting here. It has a 5 pin DIN plug on the back to connect a casette tape drive. I also recall BASICA.COM on diskette leveraged the BASIC routines in the original ROM, so it was about 1/3 the size of GWBASIC.EXE.
- nsxwolf 6y agoThat was actually “Cassette BASIC” written by IBM. It was scary to see it when you didn’t expect to, because that meant something was wrong with your disk drives!
- russellbeattie 6y agoInteresting. Was that the original IBM PC? I thought it needed DOS for some reason. I've always thought that using BASIC as the default command line was really weird... Like on an Apple II or TRS-80. You could type in a command to load something from a disk or run a program, or type a line number to start programming. How did that make sense to anyone?? To my 11yo self, it was confusing and I've never changed my mind.
- nsxwolf 6y agoYes. The original PC and PC XT had BASIC in ROM just like all the other home computers of the day. In its most bare bones configuration, you booted into BASIC and used a cassette tape drive for your storage. I don't know how common that setup was - probably not very. The most typical stripped-down PCs were dual floppy (the hard drive was a premium), and booted either MS-DOS or CP/M.
- int_19h 6y agoIf you already have a PL, why not re-use it as a shell? Those environments were very memory and storage limited, so it made a lot of sense.