Thread

BASIC on the Mac. What's available?

BASIC on the Mac. What's available? Troubleshooting 9 posts Jan 17, 2015 — Jan 24, 2015

#1 Sat, 17 Jan 2015 - 16:49

I think I have a disk with some early versions of BASIC for the Mac on them but it's hard to search using "Mac" and BASIC" on Google to do some research. I have a 400k disk that has both on it.

What is the earliest version of MS-Basic for the Mac?

What versions are available for MacBASIC? I saw the one version on Macintosh Garden but I have a newer one, it seems. The about screen says it's for a specific person to use so I'm going to take some pics and post once I remove the name. It's beta.

Thanks.

#2 Sat, 17 Jan 2015 - 17:00

The Garden has MS Basic versions 1, 2, and 3 in a single download.

#3 Sat, 17 Jan 2015 - 18:23

Thanks bigmessowires. Now I found it.

Macintosh Garden has MS-BASIC 1.00, 2.00 and 3.0 + Basic Compiler 1.0 here: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/microsoft-basic

Macintosh Garden has a MacBASIC .335 and 1.0 here: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macbasic

I'll have to check them out.

What I found in the recent Mac 128k acquisition was MacBASIC 0.44 and MS-BASIC 1.01.00. Here are a couple pics of the About screen (MacBASIC was edited to remove the name)

My opinion? Microsoft should have thrown theirs out and used Apple's version. The environment, at least, is much better. I don't now the syntax differences.

#4 Wed, 21 Jan 2015 - 17:32

Now if someone had any kind of documentation or book on how to use these, I would really appreciate it.

#5 Thu, 22 Jan 2015 - 15:43

10 PRINT "I AM GREAT"

20 GOTO 10

#6 Thu, 22 Jan 2015 - 18:57

IF I WANTED IT TO SAY "I AM GREAT" LIKE THIS

I AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREAT

I AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREAT

I AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREAT

I AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREAT

I AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREATI AM GREAT

VS

I AM GREAT

I AM GREAT

I AM GREAT

I AM GREAT

I AM GREAT

I AM GREAT

I AM GREAT

I AM GREAT

I AM GREAT

I AM GREAT

Wouldn't i just need a " ; " at the end of the print statement?

#7 Fri, 23 Jan 2015 - 00:46

Well the print command always inserts Chr(10) Chr(13) at the end of the packet.

I dont know about BASIC from back then, but modern day BASIC that I use, I always do PRINTBIN (array) then I can exclude the returns. Little more cumbersome because I have to convert the string data into a binary array, then print the array.

#8 Fri, 23 Jan 2015 - 01:12

Yeah, a semicolon like

PRINT "NO CARRIAGE RETURN";

works on every variant of BASIC I'm familiar with.

Back in the day… I used to hang out in the computer department at Sears department store, and spend hours on their Display Apple II clone systems writing programs in BASIC. One day a friend and I wrote a "Welcome to Sears" program that looked legitimate at first glance, but when people interacted with it, the program swore at them, insulted them, and called them dumbasses. A lot of unsuspecting people fell for it. We thought this was hilarious until the store security personnel emerged from nowhere and dragged us into some back room to give us a lecture. Eventually we were let go, and asked never to return to Sears. Fun times.

#9 Sat, 24 Jan 2015 - 03:14

LOL... that is hilarious.

Some of the evil things we did to store computers. I remember a buddy of mine had shown me once, how to crash an NT based system in 2 seconds.

He deleted one of the boot files, i think it was NTDETECT or something. The OS freaked out and rebooted. it was stuck in a bootloop.

He would write these crazy batch files to do some odd and crazy things, like hooking explorer.exe on launch and killing it, pressing the windows key would launch a windows explorer window open bomb, etc...