What does HackerNews think of GW-BASIC?

Someone could take this and try to make it ROM-able in order to "complete" the BIOS:

https://github.com/microsoft/GW-BASIC

BASIC itself was written in Assembler, with the nearest thing to a procedure call was the 'JMP' instruction. It's amazing how any of such scale software was written in Assembler. See here https://github.com/microsoft/GW-BASIC

> but if ever the source for QBasic leaked

QBasic? - Why that modern thing. Just use the proper BASIC: https://github.com/microsoft/GW-BASIC ;)

Hi!

Massively predictable comment making noises about Symantec code-dumping QEMM, DESQview and DESQview/X :)

Besides being a lot of fun to read, the latter (which incidentally got some attention on here just a month ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29396561) is a whole DOS-native X server. IIUC only Netware's commissioned port of XFree86 comes close to that, but that runs on top of Netware's kernel infrastructure so doesn't really count.

Naturally these sorts of situations sadly represent communicative chasms between geeks and management. Case studies in "it wasn't the end of the world" can perhaps be useful. My standard such example is the HP-20b and HP-30b calculators. On the surface they look just like other calculators HP made around the same time period (2008), but there happen to be a set of pins inside the battery compartment that allow reprogramming the non-bootloader-locked microcontroller inside. An SDK (https://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hpmuseum/archv018.c...) (consisting mostly of a keypad test demo) filled in the remaining pieces (how the keyboard matrix worked, and how to get code running on the ARM CPU, basically), and the result was the WP-34S firmware that reimplemented calculator functionality completely from scratch (the code samples in the SDK provided zero such functionality).

TL;DR, this kind of thing can definitely work and be constrained to a nice little obscure niche of very happy people with low/zero external side effects.

In this case, I wouldn't even mind if the code was released under a similar license to what D used to use (https://archive.ph/20161022202138/https://github.com/dlang/d...) before Symantec relinquished control of the project (https://forum.dlang.org/thread/[email protected]) and it was made fully open-source (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14060846). Microsoft licensing GW-BASIC (https://github.com/microsoft/GW-BASIC) and early versions of MS-DOS (https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS) under MIT is... fascinating but understandable, yet entirely unnecessary. "View only with no repercussions but not open source" works for historical interest just fine too.

What is a very good question is whether adequate precedent was set by relinquishing D that it would be tractably viable for say one or two individual campaigners to internally achieve something similar for arbitrary effectively-abandonware software that is only of historical interest.

(If this turns out to not be possible because QEMM and/or DESQview are actively being supported in some way I think the whole retrocomputing scene would be very curious to hear about that through the grapevine!)

Thanks for the interesting info about PC-DOS. That's very cool!

Try this one: https://github.com/mist64/cbmbasic

Or, although not what you asked: https://github.com/microsoft/GW-BASIC

OK, we've changed to that from https://github.com/microsoft/GW-BASIC. Thanks!