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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Lots and lots of BASIC was used in production for routine IT-ish tasks at the dawn of the personal computing era. It was the only meaningful way to implement custom tasks until the mid-80's when environments like Turbo Pascal showed up. For years and years technically-savvy small businesses were buying Apples and PC's and then writing their own BASIC to glue together whatever automation they needed.

Was much commercial software written in BASIC? (Edit, because this is being misunderstood: I'm not talking about the evolved BASICs being pushed by the late 80's, only about the ones like Applesoft and GWBASIC the commenter is asking about) No, very little. As you point out BASIC doesn't offer much to developers who already understand a macro assembler. But the market was much bigger than that.

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> Was much commercial software written in BASIC? No, very little.

There was a huge amount of commercial software written in BASIC dialects such as classic Visual Basic and ASP, Pick/BASIC, HP Business Basic, Wang 2200 Basic, DEC BASIC-PLUS, etc. Boring business software you would likely have never heard of but which was (and in some cases still is) essential to running all kinds of different businesses.

I used to work for a university and both the student administration system and the accounting system were off-the-shelf software, mostly written in VB6 and classic ASP (I believe the vendor also had some COM components written in C++, they had their own app framework, but the business logic was all VB6). At the time, we were waiting for the vendor to finish porting it to VB.NET. 20 years later, it probably still is in VB.NET.

I was surprised to get an email today notifying me of the X86 release of the DEC BASIC PLUS compiler...

FWIW those are all third generation "structured BASIC" languages, not what I understand the upthread commenter to be asking about. Obviously you can evolve the syntax into a more popular language, and Microsoft did to great effect. But that's not the BASIC that was "taught in school in the 80's".

> FWIW those are all third generation "structured BASIC" languages, not what I understand the upthread commenter to be asking about.

They weren't. Many minicomputer BASICs of the 1970s and early 1980s, such as Wang's, lacked those structured programming features you are talking about, at least originally. They were classic GOTO/GOSUB line number spaghetti code. And huge amounts of business software was written in them.

Some of those apps still run today, because the languages have been ported to Windows/Linux/etc. And eventually, just like Microsoft did, they added a lot of those structured programming features. But sometimes you'll find pre-structured spaghetti-style code surviving long after the dialect gained the ability to do better.

Suffered from a few very large non-starts in attempting to port it all to browser-agnostic JS and other frameworks by offshored teams. Couldn't capture the same UX and layouts; too much proprietary business logic in the background that less and less people have knowledge of. Unconvincing demos, bad sales, sunk cost. Good guess.

Lots of commercial software was written mainly in BASIC. Plenty of games (a couple popular examples are Temple of Apshai and Questron, but there are certainly hundreds, particularly if you look at educational games of the 80s). And a lot of productivity stuff was written in BASIC, like database management (e.g. APX Data Management System - lots of the APX titles were written in BASIC), accounting (early versions of the very popular Peachtree accounting software), and even tax software (early versions of TaxCut).

There was some business use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Basic

Was popular with some smaller companies for their internal custom systems. Had some similar capabilities as COBOL without the IBM tax.

> Had some similar capabilities as COBOL without the IBM tax.

COBOL never had an "IBM tax", because almost every non-IBM vendor had a COBOL compiler. If you didn't want your COBOL from IBM, you could buy it from DEC, HP, Wang, Unisys, NCR, Honeywell, Microsoft, Micro Focus, Watcom...

That said, if your COBOL was running on an IBM platform, you often were using lots of IBM proprietary features (e.g. CICS) which made it hard to port to another vendor–and that could indeed be an "IBM tax". But that's wasn't due to COBOL in itself. If you limited yourself to standard COBOL, and avoided IBM proprietary stuff, moving your COBOL app to another vendor didn't have to be difficult

BASIC attracted business users because it was viewed as simpler and easier to learn, because it could run on smaller machines, because (often) using an interpreter instead of compiler resulted in faster development (no edit-compile cycle).

A free copy of DEC's original COBOL compiler for the VAX can be found in the VMS 1.0 image at this site:

https://www.wherry.com/gadgets/retrocomputing/vax-simh.html

Modern GNU COBOL can be found at this site:

https://www.gnu.org/software/gnucobol/

A great deal of the COBOL that we use relies on OS2200 DMS, originally from Univac.

> A free copy of DEC's original COBOL compiler for the VAX can be found in the VMS 1.0 image at this site:

Where? I don't see any VMS 1.0 image linked to on that page.

Instead I see instructions to join the HP OpenVMS hobbyist program, which no longer exists, in order to install OpenVMS 7.3 on an emulated MicroVAX.

There is no longer any hobbyist program offering legal access to VMS for VAX. HP's hobbyist program was terminated and replaced by VSI's, which never included VAX (and more recently they appear to have dropped Alpha and Itanium, making it x86 only). Licenses to legally run VMS for VAX are very limited (e.g. maybe buy a used MicroVAX or VAXstation which comes with a VMS license)

Sorry, I posted the wrong link.

I have downloaded all of this and run it on a rhel9 clone.

https://gunkies.org/wiki/Installing_VMS_V1.0_on_SIMH

> technically-savvy small businesses were buying Apples and PC's

The outfit I worked for at the time sold directly into this area. We had a product line of simple I/O modules for physical automation (measuring temperatures, controlling motors, etc...) and all our programming instructions and examples were given in BASIC because it was on all computers and it was the one language that we knew everyone would be familiar with.

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