I always thought that the floating point routines were the big feature that made Microsoft BASIC a thing (compared with both Radio Shack and Apple integer BASIC). It's interesting reading about Monte Davidoff and also that Gates knew they needed a specialist for this.
replyThe reason i believe Microsoft Basic became popular across multiple platforms is because nobody else sold their BASIC to other hardware vendors.
replyIn those days the money was in hardware which cost a lot, and software was thrown in. It wouldnt make sense for IBM to sell their BASIC to another hardware vendor.
Microsoft was different, they would sell their languages to anyone and they did. Can anyone actually name a competitor in those early days ?
Even Apple didnt sell their own Woz written basic to other 6502 vendors, C= had to buy Microsoft Basic.
Me too. The 4K basic was quite limited in other functionalities (in order to fit into the memory). But that floating point module made it very competitive, although also made the execution slower. IMO Monte Davidoff is underappreciated.
replyI checked the documentation and looks like even the 4K version supports single precision floating point numbers (32-bit). Not sure how they managed to do it in 8-bit machines but I guess they just had to use more registers/memory for each of them.
reply2 months to write a working BASIC from scratch in the shared computer environment seems highly unlikely. I think more time would be required and having some source to inspire and guide the design would be a big advantage.
replyDoes the code work?
replyI.e., has anyone OCR'd the listing and fed it into an emulator yet?