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1313ed01 • today at 11:47 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

Even as someone that grew up with GW-BASIC and had moved on to Turbo Pascal by the time qbasic came out, I must say you have a point. I think however that the more traditional BASIC "IDE" with line numbers etc, used in GW-BASIC, has its charm and is still fun to play with. It's quite unlike any modern IDE, but there is some logic to it and with some practice it isn't bad for what it needed to do.

Replies

vunderba • today at 2:37 PM

Oh definitely! Some of my earliest memories were my dad helping me type in basic programs that were listed in the popular COMPUTE! magazine back in the day.

  10 PRINT "YOU'RE DEFINITELY GOING TO GET FATIGUED"
  20 PRINT "AFTER A FEW HUNDRED LINES OF TYPING THIS"
  30 PRINT "IN AND MAKE A MISTAKE. HAVE FUN!"
  40 PRINT CHR$(7)
pjmlp • today at 12:25 PM

You already had Turbo BASIC by then, what the OP is right about is QBASIC being freely available.

In terms of commercial products, there were already a few to chose from, including the big brother Quick BASIC, which introduced its IDE in 1986.

QBASIC was a subset from QuickBASIC 4.5.