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Programming IT Technology

What Ever Happened to QBASIC? 23

Posted by Cliff from the replaced-by-its-visual-bretheren dept.
idg101 asks: "I can remember the days when i was 10, programming in QBASIC and checking out all the programs on such sites as this one. There were exciting! Around age 13 i can remember talk of getting an internet interface to work with in your programs. Now, I am 19, and the story has apparently changed. Qbasic.com looks the same as it did many years ago. What happened to QBASIC and its followers?" My guess is that Microsoft has been doing it's best to replace all of the old-school BASIC interpreters with it's Visual Basic...which is all well and good unless all you wanted to do was fiddle with a 10-100 line quickie. So, reiterating idg101's question: are there still lightweight BASIC interpreters still floating around?
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What Ever Happened to QBASIC? More

What Ever Happened to QBASIC?

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  • Qbasic (Score:2, Interesting)

    by vertical_98 ( 463483 )
    The last Qbasic I can remember was on DOS 6.22. IBM bundled REXX with DOS 7. I think it went the way of DOS. A fine program but not enough of a money-maker.

    Vertical

  • Make your own (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bentini ( 161979 )
    Dude, if you really want, make your own.
    The first one should be easy. One chapter in "The Unix Programming Environment" makes an interpreter/compiler for a language almost as powerful as basic, just different.
    It would be a great exercise to make your own. You'd learn a lot about compilers and languages. Also, because you maintain it, you have a lot of flexibility in what it does, and how it acts. You'd also, I'm sure, get mad props on slashdot and maybe after you posted about it later, win converts for people who wanted a quick language to do what you want to do.

  • You can still download QBASIC (Score:4, Informative)

    by ajuda ( 124386 ) on Sunday September 16, 2001 @02:29PM (#2305999)
    Qbasic can be downloaded here [microsoft.com]. It's good to know that even some microsoft software is still free.

    • If you don't want to download it you can find it on the WinME CD in the olddos directory. I also saw it on the Win98SE upgrade CD.

      Too bad GORILLA.BAS is not included :-(

      • You can get gorilla.bas &c in the supplemental MSDOS files for 6.x.
      • Damn, what a game. I can remember sitting in the college computer lab for hours on end (proctor job), rewriting the various variables in Gorilla. IIRC, you could adjust the gravity, make it so bananna's that would fly off the top of the screen with the slightest amount of force, or barely clear a mountain even with thrown with enough force to launch a shuttle.

        Hot damn we thought we were l33t too. Too bad I didn't spend more of that time finding out what that weird little operating system called Linux someone installed in the math lab was all about. Oh well.
  • JabberWokky [timewarp.org] asks: "I can remember the days when i was 10, programming in AppleSoft Basic and checking out all the programs in such magazines as this one [crosswinds.net]. There were exciting! Around age 13 i can remember talk of getting a 60 baud modem and Mockingbird card to work with in your programs. Now, I am ..ahem... older, and the story has apparently changed. Nothing looks the same as it did many years ago. What happened to AppleSoft [woz.org] and its followers [linux.com]?"

    Things change. I don't compile to P-Code from Fortran anymore, and code isn't freely shared anymore.

    Oh, wait. I guess things don't change...

    Get an emulator or abandonware copy, and play with it for awhile - enjoy yourself. Nostalgia in moderate quantities is fun, and it might spark a few new ideas that apply to today's technology.

    --
    Evan

  • At Seattle Central Community College, learning QBASIC is the first requirement for an AA degree in computer analysis. I know because a friend of mine saw me messing around with some code, and he said, "Did you know I can program too?" He then took an 800-page textbook out of his book bag and showed me what he was studying - the first introduction of control structures, somewhere around page 300.

    I may have misunderstood, but I gather if he got an A in that class and the next several classes, he'd progress to Visual Basic.

  • QBasic still lives.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by os2fan ( 254461 ) on Sunday September 16, 2001 @07:07PM (#2306975) Homepage
    QBasic is still in Windows NT4, WinNT2K, and all versions of OS/2, is on the Win9x disks under "old MSDOS".

    There are three significant versions of it.

    • Version 1 comes with MSDOS 5.0, Windows NT4. It says it's MSDOS Editor, and does not support the QHELP interface.
    • Version 1.01 comes with PC-DOS 5.0, and all versions of OS/2 since 2.0, this says it's PC-DOS. It does not support the QHELP interface either.
    • Version 1.1 Comes with MS-DOS 6.x, Windows 9x. It supports the QHELP interface.

    Apart from the BASIC interpertor, you can use it as an editor and as a help engine. The edit.com and help.com automatically launch it in these modes, the files are identical, except at the end, one says EDCOM and the other says QHELP. This is handy, because in Win9x, edit.com does not appear. But if you want to make it, you can do it. You can rename edit.com and help.com to anything you like, eg qbedit.com and help6.com. This might be needed if edit and help commands do something differet, as they do in 4DOS.

    • QHELP forces QBASIC to load the file in the help viewer mode, and load HELP.HLP.
    • EDCOM forces QBASIC to load itself as an editor, and access EDIT.HLP as the help file.
    • i think qbasic serves as an awesome teaching tool. Its great because it lacks certain things such as mouse and menu systems. Intergrating a mouse and then having it interact wtih a menu system teaches the user a lot. You really learn how gui interactions take place on a higher level.

  • smallbasic is fun (Score:2, Informative)

    by Partisan ( 3249 )
    It's not exactly QBASIC but it's still a lot of fun. Currently it runs on PalmOS and Linux.
    I would not be too suprised if a Win32 version comes out soon.

    I can't say I've done anything useful with it on my Handspring Visor, but it's fun to be able to write little graphics apps.

    It does support talking to the com port so it might be useful for interfacing PalmOS supported platforms to other hardware.

    http://smallbasic.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net]
  • Liberty Basic [std.com] is sure fun. It lists not being Visual Basic as a virtue!
  • In the Olden Days, before I was knew enough about UNIX, I used to work as a programmer. The first place I worked at, we used Microsoft Basic Development System 7.0.

    Imagine QBASIC's bigger, stronger brother. On steroids. I later moved on to use Turbo Pascal (also 7.0, hmmm), and I can tell you, other than OOP there's really nothing PASCAL had on this thing, power-wise.

    MSBDS had an amazingly good IDE, had libraries/units/header files (forgot what they're called), no stupid line numbers, you could stick assembly in the BASIC 'code', had libraries that delivered the equivalent of TurboVision (mouse/windows/menubars/etc).

    I think all those DOS-mode programming languages died out and were reborn as Windows-based languages. Turbo Pascal is Delphi, QBASIC is Visual Basic, etc.

  • PowerBasic Rocks (Score:2, Informative)

    by PBCODER ( 513561 )
    Put down the Crack Pipe and step away from the p-code compiler......

    Check out http://www.powerbasic.com

    PowerBasic has its roots as TurboBasic and has advanced light years since then. This isn't your daddy's basic! small and fast compiled code, compairs to optimized c code, faster than c in some functions marginaly slower in others.
    Built in networking support in the PBDLL compiler. Put an end to Bloated software use PowerBasic.
    • Powerbasic's roots are more complex than that - Yes, Powerbasic has it roots in TurboBasic, but it's a buyback! They wrote it, sold it to Borland, and Borland sold it back

      I still do some paying work in Powerbasic, and made my living doing PDS 7.0 for a lot of years, and now do (mostly) VB and SQL server. IMHO, If you want to find a GOOD VB programmer, find one who has programmed back in PDS or TurboBasic/PowerBasic. They seem to understand how the computer WORKS, so they don't write crap
  • It used to be that programmers tried to see what could be done in QBASIC. i can remember seeing a wolfenstein 3d world of some sort. there was also talk of the internet sockets. Anyone know whatever happened to that deal? I think QBASIC is great for begginer to advance programming.. by manuplating memory with peek and poke, you can really accomplish alot.. Even more with the use of DLL's too. I am just wondering what the programmers of today are bringing to teh QBASIC world.. What programs have i missed in the recent years.
  • You can think of GWBasic as a toy assembeler language, which teaches the mode of thinking required for assembler. I borrowed assembler concepts to get around the fact that subroutines do not support subroutines.

    You can get around no parameters by using accumulators or registers. These are just ordinary variables that a particular function finds and returns data. If you want to run the function on other variables, you need to move the data around yourself.

    Functions can run at different levels. For example, processing an array needs a list function and an item function. One can have different list and item functions.

    The trick is to ensure that not more than one function at each level is active at once.

    It gets you into the habit of thinking about using a small arena wisely, and about optimising code.

    As far as literate programing goes, I use a preprocessor that allows you to strip the basic code out of a text document. That is, one can write a lengthy text document on the subject, and use grep to write the table of contents and the output basic code. Because basic will order the lines as required, you can add and remove functionality by adding and removing chapters of the documentation. This is really interesting to see consequtive lines of a routine come from different chapters of a book... But it makes for tight well documented code. It is just that, like the accumulators, the chief switching routines are also carefully designed to support later insertions.

    And one from this, sees why the people who wrote C/C++ wanted to move away from a single arena and single open code base...

  • Was there ever a memory limitation with QB?

    I remembered moving off Qbasic/QuickBasic/GWBasic to C+ASM because I wanted to interact with the system resources directly.

    Man. I missed those days. When the Internet came around I used to download the ABC packets monthly.

    Haven't touched that language for a long while. Never will again I guess, now that I have Linux+Python+SDL.

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