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QBasic and its history

QBasic

Not to be confused with Quick Basic.
QBasic
QBasic Opening Screen.png
ParadigmProcedural
DeveloperMicrosoft
First appeared1991; 25 years ago
OSMS-DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, PC DOS, OS/2,eComStation
LicensePart of the operating system (a variety of closed-source licenses)
Websitewww.microsoft.com
Influenced by
QuickBASIC, GW-BASIC
Influenced
QB64, Small Basic
QBasic (Microsoft Quick Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is an IDE and interpreter for a variety of the BASIC programming language which is based on QuickBASIC. Code entered into the IDE is compiled to anintermediate representation, and this IR is immediately interpreted on demand within the IDE.[1] It can run under nearly all versions of DOS and Windows, or through DOSBox/DOSEMU, on Linux and FreeBSD.[2] For its time, QBasic provided a state-of-the-art IDE, including a debugger with features such as on-the-fly expression evaluation and code modification.
Like QuickBASIC, but unlike earlier versions of Microsoft BASIC, QBasic is astructured programming language, supporting constructs such as subroutinesand while loops.[3][4] Line numbers, a concept often associated with BASIC, are supported for compatibility, but are not considered good form, having been replaced by descriptive line labels.[1] QBasic has limited support for user-defined data types (structures), and several primitive types used to contain strings of text or numeric data.[5][6]

HistoryEdit

QBasic was intended as a replacement for GW-BASIC. It was based on the earlier QuickBASIC 4.5 compiler but without QuickBASIC's compiler and linker elements. Version 1.0 was shipped together with MS-DOS 5.0 and higher, as well as Windows 95, Windows NT 3.x, and Windows NT 4.0. IBM recompiled QBasic and included it in PC DOS 5.x, as well as OS/2 2.0 onwards.[7]eComStation, descended from OS/2 code, includes QBasic 1.0. QBasic 1.1 is included with MS-DOS 6.x, and, without EDIT, in Windows 95, Windows 98 andWindows Me. Starting with Windows 2000, Microsoft no longer includes QBasic with their operating systems,[8] but can still be obtained for use on newer versions of Windows.
QBasic (as well as the built-in MS-DOS Editor) is backward compatible with DOS releases prior to 5.0 (down to at least DOS 3.20). However, if used on any8088/8086 computers, or on some 80286 computers, the QBasic program may run very slowly, or perhaps not at all, due to DOS memory size limits. Until MS-DOS 7, MS-DOS Editor required QBasic: the EDIT.COM program simply started QBasic in editor mode only, and this mode can also be entered by running QBASIC.EXE with the /EDITOR switch (i.e., command line QBASIC /EDITOR).
It was founded by Tom Kurtz and John George Kemeny of Dartmouth college.

source wikipedia

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