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To be fair, Microsoft Basic practically was an operating system, in its day. It’s what many computers booted into, and sometimes the environment in which everything else was run from.

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To be fair BASIC was not much of a deal. The interpreter is just a REPL. Very basic at it, hence the name. The BASIC was not invented by MS: they replicated it. The real operating system part was done by computer manufacturers. For instance it was Dragon Data that brought the "kind of" OS routines in the Dragon32. Floppy disk managment, I/O, etc. MS just brought the REPL and ... bugs.

> BASIC was not much of a deal. The interpreter is just a REPL. Very basic at it, hence the name.

The language is named after its goal of being something easy to learn. It is a fairly contrived acronym, Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

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