Business Basic: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 03:06, 22 January 2019

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.

Implementations

Business Basic
	DOS	Windows	Windows 95	Windows NT	OS/2
BASIS PRO/5	X	X	X	X
BASIS BBxPROGRESSION/4	X	X
MicroShare	X	X		X	X
MAI OpenBasic	X	X	X	X
PLUTO Business Basic	X
BBIcon ProvideX	X	X	X	X	X
Thoroughbred	X	X	X	X
Transoft U/BL		X
KCML	X	X		X	X

Links

Business Basic FAQ

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-#REDIRECT [[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.
+==Implementations==
+{|class="wikitable"
+|+Business Basic
+! ||width=8%|DOS||width=8%|Windows||width=8%|Windows 95||width=8%|Windows NT||width=8%|OS/2
+|-
+|BASIS PRO/5||X||X||X||X||
+|-
+|BASIS BBxPROGRESSION/4||X||X|| || ||
+|-
+|MicroShare||X||X|| ||X||X
+|-
+|MAI OpenBasic||X||X||X||X||
+|-
+|PLUTO Business Basic||X|| || || ||
+|-
+|BBIcon ProvideX||X||X||X||X||X
+|-
+|Thoroughbred||X||X||X||X||
+|-
+|Transoft U/BL|| ||X|| || ||
+|-
+|KCML||X||X|| ||X||X
+|}
+==Links==
+* [http://www.faqs.org/faqs/business-basic/faq/ Business Basic FAQ]
+[[Category:BASIC]]