Microsoft has open sourced GW-BASIC, a programming language developed some 38 years ago. GW-BASIC and variants such as QBasic, QuickBasic and others provided the onramp to computer programming for ...

The new product extended GW-BASIC with more graphics support, better structuring, and - at last - a compiler. Developers could now produce EXE files, greatly improving performance.

Microsoft’s GW-BASIC is a programming language that was released in 1983 and bundled with MS-DOS on early PCs. It was the first programming language many students and developers learned in the ...

Microsoft’s GW-BASIC is a programming language that was released in 1983 and bundled with MS-DOS on early PCs. It was the first programming language many students and developers learned in the ...

There were other versions, of course, especially for very small computers, but the gold standard for home computer Basic was Microsoft’s version, known then as GW-Basic.

GW-BASIC probably isn’t a good choice for much of anything today, and I suspect a large enterprise isn’t going to bet the company on some upstart framework using Perl.

It came with BASIC both on ROM (BASICA) and disk (GW_BASIC). Massively popular, it lead to MS-DOS becoming the standard operating system for businesses (and many home users) just about everywhere.