> They had the best BASIC interpreter in the business
Given the whole thread that spawned from this, I have to say that I think this was poorly-worded.
MS did not have the "best" BASIC by any measure except by one: it had the smallest BASIC in the business.
The early MS BASIC releases ran in 4 kB or so, and even later on after it expanded, it still ran in 8kB.
Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Monty Davidoff were famous for fitting a lot of code into a very small amount of space. That was the basis of the former two's extraordinarily successful careers.
But "best"? No.
By 1981, Acorn offered BBC BASIC, a drastically better language by any measure: structured programming, local variables inside named procedures, inline assembler and more. But it needed 16kB of ROM: a quarter of the memory map of an 8-bit CPU.
> and everyone licensed from them already.
"Everybody" did not license it. AFAICR Atari and Apple didn't; across the ocean, Sinclair and Acorn and Tangerine didn't.
But yes, MS BASIC was dominant on the early American 8-bit machines: it was on Commodore, and I think on Tandy, and of course on the IBM PC right in the ROM if you didn't have disk drives.
Given the whole thread that spawned from this, I have to say that I think this was poorly-worded.
MS did not have the "best" BASIC by any measure except by one: it had the smallest BASIC in the business.
The early MS BASIC releases ran in 4 kB or so, and even later on after it expanded, it still ran in 8kB.
Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Monty Davidoff were famous for fitting a lot of code into a very small amount of space. That was the basis of the former two's extraordinarily successful careers.
But "best"? No.
By 1981, Acorn offered BBC BASIC, a drastically better language by any measure: structured programming, local variables inside named procedures, inline assembler and more. But it needed 16kB of ROM: a quarter of the memory map of an 8-bit CPU.
> and everyone licensed from them already.
"Everybody" did not license it. AFAICR Atari and Apple didn't; across the ocean, Sinclair and Acorn and Tangerine didn't.
But yes, MS BASIC was dominant on the early American 8-bit machines: it was on Commodore, and I think on Tandy, and of course on the IBM PC right in the ROM if you didn't have disk drives.