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's and it remained the most popular programming language on personal computers until the 1990's.
Like the FORTRAN language it is based on Basic is unstructured and therefore there is a tendency for programmers to write spaghetti code when developing in Basic, and with the variants used in microcomputers, known collectively as "Street Basic", the tendency was even greater. Awareness of this shortcoming increased in the early 80's as Basic started to come under threat in educational institutions on one hand from languages designed from ground up to teach structured programming like COMAL and on the other hand from inexpensive implementations of Pascal. Many Basic developers responded by making their variations of the language increasingly structured to a point where some of them resemble Pascal in all aspects except syntax.
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
- GFA Basic - Discontinued
- IBM VisualAge for Basic - Discontinued
- Liberty BASIC - Discontinued
- Microsoft Visual Basic - Discontinued
- Omni Basic - Discontinued
- True Basic - No longer developed but available for sale at a discounted price. 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
- GFA Basic - Discontinued - Free Download
- Microsoft Visual Basic - Discontinued. Version 1 offered DOS support.
- MWBasic - Aka MB86 - Discontinued
- Napoleon Brandy Basic - Current - Open Source
- Omni Basic - Discontinued
- QBasic - Comes included with the OS/2 DOS subsystem in versions 2.0 and higher.
- QuickBasic - Discontinued
- 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.
- GFA Basic - Discontinued - Free Download - Limited support available from a third party.
- Liberty BASIC - Discontinued - Last version that works under WinOS/2 is 2.02
- Microsoft Visual Basic - Discontinued. Versions 1 to 4 offer WinOS/2 support.
- True Basic - Discontinued. Versions up to 5.3 supported WinOS/2