BASIC Implementations

A subset of FORTRAN originally developed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz in 1964 to offer an easier programming language for beginners for the Dartmouth University multi-user system. Basic was easy to implement and could reside in a fairly small amount of memory which made it popular with the first generation of microcomputers in the 1970' and it remained the most popular programming language on personal computers until the 1990's.

Basic started to loose its popularity when GUI's became more popular but most Basic implementation had limited support for the programming models needed.

A list of OS/2 implementations of Basic

• Bywater Basic - Current - Command line only.
• CA Realizer - Discontinued. Versions 1 & 2 offered OS/2 support
• IBM VisualAge for Basic - Discontinued
• Liberty BASIC - Discontinued
• Microsoft Visual Basic - Discontinued
• True Basic - Discontinued. Versions up to 5.5 supported OS/2

A list of DOS implementations of Basic

• BBC Basic - Discontinued but supplied for free with the Windows version of the product.
• Bywater Basic - Current.
• CBasic - Discontinued
• Microsoft Visual Basic - Discontinued. Version 1 offered DOS support.
• MWBasic - Aka MB86 - Discontinued
• QuickBasic
• True Basic - Discontinued. Versions up to 4.01 supported DOS.

A list of Basic implementations that run under Win-OS/2

• CA Realizer - Discontinued. Versions 1 to 3 offer WinOS/2 support.
• Microsoft Visual Basic - Discontinued. Versions 1 to 4 offer WinOS/2 support.
• True Basic - Discontinued. Versions up to 5.3 supported WinOS/2

A list of Basic language implementations in Java

• Cocoa
• Jasic