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BASIC on the Mac. What's available?
Posted by: snuci on 2015-01-17 08:49:37
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.
Posted by: bigmessowires on 2015-01-17 09:00:04
The Garden has MS Basic versions 1, 2, and 3 in a single download.
Posted by: snuci on 2015-01-17 10:23:20
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)

Macintosh BASICs.jpg

MacBASIC 0.44 .jpg

MS-BASIC 1.01.00.jpg

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.
Posted by: 3583Bytes on 2015-01-21 09:32:25
Now if someone had any kind of documentation or book on how to use these, I would really appreciate it.
Posted by: bigmessowires on 2015-01-22 07:43:35
10 PRINT "I AM GREAT"

20 GOTO 10

🙂

Posted by: uniserver on 2015-01-22 10:57:32
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?   🙂

Posted by: techknight on 2015-01-22 16:46:16
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. 
Posted by: bigmessowires on 2015-01-22 17:12:46
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.
Posted by: techknight on 2015-01-23 19:14:05
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... 
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