> They had the best BASIC interpreter in the business[0] and everyone licensed from them already.
Commodore 64 owners may have a different opinion.... :P
Commodore 64 owners may have a different opinion.... :P
If only Woz had been willing to add floating point support to his BASIC. He was perfectly capable of it! Would’ve saved Apple a lot of heartache later.
CBM BASIC 2 was terrible. It didn't support any of the C64's excellent (for the time) sound and graphics. It didn't have structured command (IF... THEN... ELSE, REPEAT... UNTIL, WHILE... WEND etc.) or named procedures or local variables or anything.
But it was small.
This terrible BASIC is why most of the world became convinced that BASIC was a bad programming language. Other contemporaneous 8-bit home computers had much better BASICs, notably the Acorn 8-bits, but also Sinclair, Oric and others.