GW-BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language developed by Microsoft from IBM BASICA. Functionally identical to BASICA, its BASIC interpreter is a fully self-contained executable and does not need the Cassette BASIC ROM found in the original IBM PC. It was bundled with MS-DOS operating systems on IBM PC compatibles by Microsoft.
WordStar is a word processor application for microcomputers. It was published by MicroPro International and originally written for the CP/M-80 operating system, with later editions added for MS-DOS and other 16-bit PC OSes. Rob Barnaby was the sole author of the early versions of the program.
CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initially confined to single-tasking on 8-bit processors and no more than 64 kilobytes of memory, later versions of CP/M added multi-user variations and were migrated to 16-bit processors.
In computing, cross-platform software is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software requires a separate build for each platform, but some can be directly run on any platform without special preparation, being written in an interpreted language or compiled to portable bytecode for which the interpreters or run-time packages are common or standard components of all supported platforms.
Microsoft BASIC is the foundation software product of the Microsoft company and evolved into a line of BASIC interpreters and compiler(s) adapted for many different microcomputers. It first appeared in 1975 as Altair BASIC, which was the first version of BASIC published by Microsoft as well as the first high-level programming language available for the Altair 8800 microcomputer.
86-DOS is a discontinued operating system developed and marketed by Seattle Computer Products (SCP) for its Intel 8086-based computer kit.
Nibbles, also known by the source code's file name NIBBLES.BAS, is a variant of the snake video game concept used to demonstrate the QBasic programming language. Nibbles was written in QBasic by Rick Raddatz, who later went on to create small businesses such as Xiosoft and Bizpad.
A fat binary is a computer executable program or library which has been expanded with code native to multiple instruction sets which can consequently be run on multiple processor types. This results in a file larger than a normal one-architecture binary file, thus the name.
Donkey, often known by its filename DONKEY.BAS, is a video game written in 1981, and included with early versions of the IBM PC DOS operating system distributed with the original IBM PC. It is a top-down driving game in which the player must avoid hitting donkeys. The game was written by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and early employee Neil Konzen.
DOS Plus was the first operating system developed by Digital Research's OEM Support Group in Newbury, Berkshire, UK, first released in 1985. DOS Plus 1.0 was based on CP/M-86 Plus combined with the PCMODE emulator from Concurrent PC DOS 4.11. While CP/M-86 Plus and Concurrent DOS 4.1 still had been developed in the United States, Concurrent PC DOS 4.11 was an internationalized and bug-fixed version brought forward by Digital Research UK. Later DOS Plus 2.x issues were based on Concurrent PC DOS 5.0 instead. In the broader picture, DOS Plus can be seen as an intermediate step between Concurrent CP/M-86 and DR DOS.
Star Trader is a 1974 video game and an early example of the space trading genre. The game involves players moving from star to star on a map of the galaxy, buying and selling quantities of six types of merchandise in a competition to make the most money. The game was developed by Dave Kaufman for computers in 1973, and its BASIC source code was printed in the January 1974 issue of the People's Computer Company Newsletter. It was reprinted in the 1977 book What to Do After You Hit Return. The game was the inspiration for the multiplayer Trade Wars series, beginning in 1984, and is thought to be the antecedent to much of the space trading genre.
A source-to-source translator, source-to-source compiler, transcompiler, or transpiler is a type of translator that takes the source code of a program written in a programming language as its input and produces an equivalent source code in the same or a different programming language. A source-to-source translator converts between programming languages that operate at approximately the same level of abstraction, while a traditional compiler translates from a higher level programming language to a lower level programming language. For example, a source-to-source translator may perform a translation of a program from Python to JavaScript, while a traditional compiler translates from a language like C to assembler or Java to bytecode. An automatic parallelizing compiler will frequently take in a high level language program as an input and then transform the code and annotate it with parallel code annotations or language constructs.
MSX-DOS is a discontinued disk operating system developed by Microsoft for the 8-bit home computer standard MSX, and is a cross between MS-DOS v1.25 and CP/M-80 v2.2.
The line-oriented debugger DEBUG.EXE is an external command in operating systems such as DOS, OS/2 and Windows.
TREK73 is a computer game based on the original Star Trek television series. It was created in 1973 by William K. Char, Perry Lee, and Dan Gee for the Hewlett-Packard 2000 minicomputer in HP Time-Shared BASIC. The game was played via teletype. Trek73 is so big that it needs the CHAIN feature of HP2000 BASIC.
MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few operating systems attempting to be compatible with MS-DOS, are sometimes referred to as "DOS". MS-DOS was the main operating system for IBM PC compatibles during the 1980s, from which point it was gradually superseded by operating systems offering a graphical user interface (GUI), in various generations of the graphical Microsoft Windows operating system.
DOS is a family of disk-based operating systems for IBM PC compatible computers. The DOS family primarily consists of Microsoft's MS-DOS and a rebranded version, IBM PC DOS, both of which were introduced in 1981. Later compatible systems from other manufacturers include DR-DOS (1988), ROM-DOS (1989), PTS-DOS (1993), and FreeDOS (1998). MS-DOS dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995.
QBasic is an integrated development environment (IDE) and interpreter for a variety of dialects of BASIC which are based on QuickBASIC. Code entered into the IDE is compiled to an intermediate representation (IR), and this IR is immediately executed on demand within the IDE.
