[Info-vax] Back to BASICs

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Tuesday, October 5, 2021 at 11:29:56 AM UTC+13, Mark Daniel wrote:
> An interesting (though more than occasionally dry) recent read on the 
> development of Kemeny and Kurtz' BASIC and its associated infrastructure 
> and expanding network(s) in the '60s (well before my time) and on into 
> the '70s (more my time). 

They tried to sell “True BASIC” as a product for the IBM PC, but most people had become accustomed to Microsoft’s dialect, and found the “True” form too much of a shift.

There was one BASIC dialect that, looking back, seemed quite interesting (not that I knew about it at the time): it was called “GRASS”, or there was a version specifically for a Z80-based machine, called “ZGRASS”.

It had no line numbers, function/subroutine bodies were held in string variables, and it also had foreground and background threading. All pretty sophisticated for, what was it, 1978?

You can find docs online at Bitsavers -- see the pdf/datamax/ and pdf/nuttingAssoc/ directories.