I always thought that the floating point routines were the big feature that made Microsoft BASIC a thing (compared with both Radio Shack and Apple integer BASIC). It's interesting reading about Monte Davidoff and also that Gates knew they needed a specialist for this.
The reason i believe Microsoft Basic became popular across multiple platforms is because nobody else sold their BASIC to other hardware vendors.
In those days the money was in hardware which cost a lot, and software was thrown in. It wouldnt make sense for IBM to sell their BASIC to another hardware vendor.
Microsoft was different, they would sell their languages to anyone and they did. Can anyone actually name a competitor in those early days ?
Even Apple didnt sell their own Woz written basic to other 6502 vendors, C= had to buy Microsoft Basic.
MicroFORTH would have been the nearest thing to it - but FORTH was sufficiently easy to implement that most vendors decided to make their own rather than pay FORTH Inc.
SofTech Pascal could have been there, too, if they hadn't priced it way out of the reach of hobbyists.
In many ways, that was Microsoft's real genius - charging just a few dollars per user to the manufacturers. Even the Professional Development System was only low hundreds of dollars rather than thousands. They were the first tech company to use the "make it up on volume" strategy.
Software had always been one big project with a dedicated team to build something one off, like building a hospital. Every customer commissioned their own software.
Microsoft recognized that the future was writing smaller software that was meant to be sold to many, many people for less money each.
Me too. The 4K basic was quite limited in other functionalities (in order to fit into the memory). But that floating point module made it very competitive, although also made the execution slower. IMO Monte Davidoff is underappreciated.
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I always thought that the floating point routines were the big feature that made Microsoft BASIC a thing (compared with both Radio Shack and Apple integer BASIC). It's interesting reading about Monte Davidoff and also that Gates knew they needed a specialist for this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Davidoff
The reason i believe Microsoft Basic became popular across multiple platforms is because nobody else sold their BASIC to other hardware vendors.
In those days the money was in hardware which cost a lot, and software was thrown in. It wouldnt make sense for IBM to sell their BASIC to another hardware vendor.
Microsoft was different, they would sell their languages to anyone and they did. Can anyone actually name a competitor in those early days ?
Even Apple didnt sell their own Woz written basic to other 6502 vendors, C= had to buy Microsoft Basic.
MicroFORTH would have been the nearest thing to it - but FORTH was sufficiently easy to implement that most vendors decided to make their own rather than pay FORTH Inc.
SofTech Pascal could have been there, too, if they hadn't priced it way out of the reach of hobbyists.
In many ways, that was Microsoft's real genius - charging just a few dollars per user to the manufacturers. Even the Professional Development System was only low hundreds of dollars rather than thousands. They were the first tech company to use the "make it up on volume" strategy.
It is right there in the name.
Software had always been one big project with a dedicated team to build something one off, like building a hospital. Every customer commissioned their own software.
Microsoft recognized that the future was writing smaller software that was meant to be sold to many, many people for less money each.
Me too. The 4K basic was quite limited in other functionalities (in order to fit into the memory). But that floating point module made it very competitive, although also made the execution slower. IMO Monte Davidoff is underappreciated.