2 ms·
It's strangely sad that, despite all of the legacy cruft maintained from the original IBM PC until now, that ROM BASIC hasn't survived. Just imagine some hole i
by nxobject 2y ago
It's strangely sad that, despite all of the legacy cruft maintained from the original IBM PC until now, that ROM BASIC hasn't survived. Just imagine some hole in the memory map reserved for ROM BASIC, some dark corner of UEFI mandating the implementation of a vestigial ROM BASIC for compatibility.
- fredoralive 2y agoThe space originally allocated to ROM BASIC (and a user ROM slot) was taken over by a larger allocation for the BIOS over time. Seeing as BIOS compatibility is on its way out (or gone) with modern UEFI systems, you’d assume a ROM BASIC support would’ve gone with it had it continued. I think the fact that just about everyone bought a PC with disc drives / DOS, and never used ROM BASIC directly meant PC clones just saved the $30 (or whatever) of ROM chips and loaded all of BASIC from disc.
- ndiddy 2y agoPC clones probably didn’t bother with it due to a combination of ROM BASIC being copyrighted, DOS software not needing it, and GW-BASIC being available so people could run BASIC programs from DOS. Note that IBM included ROM BASIC on their PCs up until at least the early 90s.