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PayPalSome fun computing history for you here as Microsoft recently open sourced Microsoft 6502 BASIC under the MIT license.
While there have been versions of it floating around for a long time, Microsoft decided just to play nice and make it official and give it out to everyone. Back in 2024, they also open sourced MS-DOS 4.0. This is perhaps even more important though for computing history, with it being Microsoft's first official product and served as the foundation for the modern software industry.
From their blog post going over the background of it:
This is BASIC M6502 8K VER 1.1, the 6502 BASIC lineage that powered an era of home computing and formed the foundation of Commodore BASIC in the PET, VIC-20, and the legendary Commodore 64. This very source tree also contains adaptations for the Apple II (“Applesoft BASIC”), built from the same core BASIC source. The original headers still read, “BASIC M6502 8K VER 1.1 BY MICRO-SOFT”—a time capsule from 1978.
The version we are releasing here—labeled “1.1”—contains fixes to the garbage collector identified by Commodore and jointly implemented in 1978 by Commodore engineer John Feagans and Bill Gates, when Feagans traveled to Microsoft’s Bellevue offices. This is the version that shipped as the PET’s “BASIC V2.” It even contains a playful Bill Gates Easter egg, hidden in the labels STORDO and STORD0, which Gates himself confirmed in 2010.
And a snippet from the GitHub on why it's historically important:
1. Foundation of the Personal Computer Revolution
- This BASIC interpreter was the software foundation that powered many of the most influential early personal computers.
- It democratized programming by making it accessible to non-technical users through a simple, English-like programming language.
- Without this software, the personal computer revolution might have developed very differently.
The code is available on GitHub. And see the Microsoft blog post for more background.
Pretty cool to see it official like this.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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walther von stolzing 3 hours ago
A few years later the same trick worked on IBM with DOS, of course, which catapulted MS into desktop software dominance, and Gates himself into the most prestigeous of prestigeous lists of wonderfully prestigeous people.
MS paid a small company to plagiarize DOS out of Gary Kildall's CP/M, of course; and IBM got 'tricked' into the deal partly because Bill's mom was in the board of directors at IBM at the time.
Kildall always had a distaste for BASIC, by the way, and he thought a clunky procedural language like that did a disservice to programming education -- and not because he had a rival 'product' he was frustrated he couldn't sell instead. Kildall thought LOGO would've been a better educational language.
walther von stolzing 2 hours ago
-- BASIC interpreter in flex & bison: https://github.com/Dan-Jardim/BasicFlexBison.git [External Link]
-- as a PEG parser: https://git.sr.ht/~ach/minipeg/tree/HEAD/examples/basic.peg [External Link]
-- Antlr grammar for a BASIC that runs inside the JVM: https://github.com/antlr/grammars-v4/tree/master/basic [External Link]
Bill's mom was in the board of directors at IBMSame old story - whenever you consider that a prominent (but usually ethically bereft) entrepreneur is successful because of their skill and commitment, you later discover it's largely just simple nepotism, privilege or luck. Gates, Jobs, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, it's just endless.
Often it's a combination of all three.
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