Business Basic

Business Basic is a variant of the BASIC language that was developed in the latter half of the 1960's to allow minicomputers to offer a cheaper alternative to mainframe COBOL for business application development.

History
Data General simply took Dartmouth BASIC and added rudimentary file indexing features, like simplified versions of COBOL indices. Other minicomputer vendors like Wang followed suit. While there are simple interpreters and compiled variants of the language, one of the classic characteristics of Business Basic was that it was interactive, making some applications developed using it strikingly different from the norm. While Business Basic is not well known in general, it really only saw any use in the USA and to a lesser degree other English speaking countries. It has been extremely tenacious in the market, a large number of specialised and vertical business applications developed using the language has ensured its survival in the PC and UNIX world in much the same way COBOL still thrives on bigger computer systems.

Publications

 * MAI BasicFour - Business Basic 86 Reference Manual - 1987 - From Bitsavers - Not a useful document as such, but gives you a better insight into Business Basic than introductory articles.

Links

 * Business Basic FAQ
 * BASIS BBj - Java implementation