OT: the story of bywater basic

OT: the story of bywater basic

[Ethan Grammatikidis]

i just found this and thought it might amuse some of the minds here.

8. THE STORY OF BYWATER BASIC

   This program was originally begun in 1982 by my grandmother, Mrs.
   Verda Spell of Beaumont, TX.  She was writing the program using
   an ANSI C compiler on an Osborne I CP/M computer and although my
   grandfather (Lockwood Spell) had bought an IBM PC with 256k of
   RAM my grandmother would not use it, paraphrasing George Herbert
   to the effect that "He who cannot in 64k program, cannot in 512k."
   She had used Microsoft BASIC and although she had nothing against
   it she said repeatedly that she didn't understand why Digital
   Research didn't "sue the socks off of Microsoft" for version 1.0
   of MSDOS and so I reckon that she hoped to undercut Microsoft's
   entire market and eventually build a new software empire on
   the North End of Beaumont. Her programming efforts were cut
   tragically short when she was thrown from a Beaumont to Port
   Arthur commuter train in the summer of 1986. I found the source
   code to bwBASIC on a single-density Osborne diskette in her knitting
   bag and eventually managed to have it all copied over to a PC
   diskette. I have revised it slightly prior to this release. You
   should know, though, that I myself am an historian, not a programmer.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/bwbasic/
version 2.2 is simple but slow and rather featureless. i didn't look at newer versions. the only reason i'm looking at it at all is because it came my way via freedos and can run programs like a shell. if anyone feels a desperate need for basic under plan 9 (lol), it should compile with any ansi c compiler.

-- 
Linux? I used ext4 for a few years. In proportion to the time spent using it, I lost as much data to it as I lost to the very worst released version of reiserfs.

Re: [9front] OT: the story of bywater basic

[Stanley Lieber]

> I reckon that she hoped to undercut Microsoft's
>   entire market and eventually build a new software empire on
>   the North End of Beaumont. 

[...]

> Her programming efforts were cut
>   tragically short when she was thrown from a Beaumont to Port
>   Arthur commuter train in the summer of 1986.

No relation.

sl

Re: [9front] OT: the story of bywater basic

[Ethan Grammatikidis]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2017, at 05:02 PM, Stanley Lieber wrote:
> > I reckon that she hoped to undercut Microsoft's
> >   entire market and eventually build a new software empire on
> >   the North End of Beaumont. 
> 
> [...]
> 
> > Her programming efforts were cut
> >   tragically short when she was thrown from a Beaumont to Port
> >   Arthur commuter train in the summer of 1986.
> 
> No relation.
> 
> sl
> 

haha!

-- 
Linux? I used ext4 for a few years. In proportion to the time spent using it, I lost as much data to it as I lost to the very worst released version of reiserfs.