Tim
kb0odu

Back on topic: I debugged CBasic one time for a customer, and it wasn’t hard. I’ll guess that CBasic was one inspiration for Visual Basic, though I can’t prove it.

I am not looking forward to the day when Pournelle and Dvorak are no longer actively writing for the computer industry. Their contributions and opinions in the various articles over time have had an affect on the industry that may be overlooked by future historian bloggers as they dictate their theories on the early ages of the computer era to Web X.0 version web site (which will still be based on crappy html…sigh)….

Another great article JCD!! Keep em coming!!

It’ll give me something to do today, I’m stuck at home cuz of snow & ice on raods

Anyone know how to contact Mr. Eubanks? I have the Compiler Systems sign that was on the door of there Sierra Madre office. Be fun to send it along to him.

Later
Jack

The original blue CBASIC manual (I presume the one written by Cooper) was a paragon of accurate and concise information. I was terribly spoiled by it. Even today I still expect to get help from a Windows Help file or to solve a problem using a Windows Troubleshooter until, oh yeah, reality is perceived again.

I wrote a package of programs for the Chess Federation of Canada membership / rating system that I guess totalled many thousands of lines of code. When the 64K-RAM, S-100 CP/M computer (a Quasar Data Products, from Brecksville, Ohio) was getting long in the tooth and they acquired a – gasp! – IBM PC, or maybe it was a clone, the software ran under CBASIC86, no problem. The guy who was then in charge told me that only a couple of lines of code needed to be changed. Pretty amazing for a pre-Java 1985 platform migration.

Digital Research also produced CB80 and CB86, which generated CBASIC executables for CP/M and DOS, respectively. Let’s see, do I remember this correctly, an executable in CP/M was a .CMD file, and in DOS it was a .COM file. The CB8? products worked great, too.

CBASIC’s eclipse was sudden. I had an email exchange with a guy who wrote books about QuickBASIC / QBASIC, which obviously borrowed a lot of inspiration from CBASIC, but the chap had never heard of CBASIC!

I wrote my CBASIC programs with ED, the editor that came with CP/M. Most of you will be too young to remember, but ED was a line editor, not a screen editor. To see the first lines of your document, for example, you had to enter something like b23t in command mode. You’d think that EDLIN, the DOS line editor which came out about 5 years later, would have improved on ED, but no, EDLIN was inferior. I guess they couldn’t figure out how to code the j(uxtapose) command from ED, so they just left it out (for example). Wandering a bit here, but the point is that program creation with ED had a purely nerdy appeal so, yes, some sort of IDE might have brought in new sales.

Digital Research had many great products, but dealing with them (somehow it seemed that you’d be directed to an obnoxious marketing hack rather than a technician) was not always a pleasure. For the price they charged, you expected full support on the rare occasions that it was needed.

I hope there will be an article on what ever happened to … Concurrent DOS.

I remember lusting after the p-system pascal thing, but as I recall, it was something like $1000, which I couldn’t justify. By 1982, I was using Desmet C, which sold for under $100, and was a really really good product. (Mark Desmet, I believe, also wrote the assembler that Intel used internally, although I’ve never been able to verify that.)

A product like CBasic, even though it may have been technically superior, and much more popular with full-time professionals, was bound to get completely overlooked during that golden age of freeware and shareware pretty much because of people like me.