3 ms·

Microsoft might not have been the one doing the pushing, but claiming the customers wanted it is only telling half the truth at best. I think it's fair to say

Microsoft might not have been the one doing the pushing, but claiming the customers wanted it is only telling half the truth at best. I think it's fair to say that most customers then were unaware of the alternatives and the decision was made by the manufacturers of those home computers. BASIC might very well have been the best choice for those casually interested in computers. Educators would have preferred others though (Pascal, Scheme and COMAL come to mind). FORTH would have scared away most customers, but amazed and inspired others (I sadly discovered it only after its prime). Turbo Pascal didn't require (much) more memory than elaborate BASIC implementations and ran at reasonable speed even on a Z80. Not quite the same interactivity of an interpreter perhaps, but not much behind. It came late to the scene though.

musicale 6y ago
Apple had a Pascal implementation, but it required floppy disks and more memory. They also had Logo and possibly other languages. Logo is an interesting alternative to BASIC since it's beginner-friendly. Microsoft (and other companies such as Digital Research et al.) supplied a number of languages other than BASIC (Pascal, Fortran, COBOL...) but they typically required more resources and were less novice-friendly. BASIC worked out of ROM and a few kilobytes of RAM, and was easy to learn. As you note, Turbo Pascal - a nice environment with a fast one-pass compiler - came out later. It does seem to have had a cassette version at some point, but it required more RAM than BASIC and was harder to learn. Nonetheless it was highly successful and its descendant Delphi is still used today. It's hard to get Scheme to run in a few kilobytes, but it would be fun to try. Primitive LISPs did seem to exist on microcomputers but only gave you a few atoms and cons cells because of memory limits. COMAL was largely based on BASIC but never caught on as widely. In any case, I don't think Microsoft gets the credit or the blame for BBC BASIC. (There were also versions of microcomputer BASICs from companies other than Microsoft, dating to the early 1970s.) disclaimer: I've only seen it running in an emulator like the BBC Micro bot; it looks cool though. ;-)

musicale 6y ago

Apple had a Pascal implementation, but it required floppy disks and more memory. They also had Logo and possibly other languages. Logo is an interesting alternative to BASIC since it's beginner-friendly. Microsoft (and other companies such as Digital Research et al.) supplied a number of languages other than BASIC (Pascal, Fortran, COBOL...) but they typically required more resources and were less novice-friendly. BASIC worked out of ROM and a few kilobytes of RAM, and was easy to learn. As you note, Turbo Pascal - a nice environment with a fast one-pass compiler - came out later. It does seem to have had a cassette version at some point, but it required more RAM than BASIC and was harder to learn. Nonetheless it was highly successful and its descendant Delphi is still used today. It's hard to get Scheme to run in a few kilobytes, but it would be fun to try. Primitive LISPs did seem to exist on microcomputers but only gave you a few atoms and cons cells because of memory limits. COMAL was largely based on BASIC but never caught on as widely. In any case, I don't think Microsoft gets the credit or the blame for BBC BASIC. (There were also versions of microcomputer BASICs from companies other than Microsoft, dating to the early 1970s.) disclaimer: I've only seen it running in an emulator like the BBC Micro bot; it looks cool though. ;-)