CAN'T GET TO qBASIC ON WINDOWS XP

[moochthemonkey]

Didn't anyone stop to think that Qbasic does not come on the Windows XP install disc and possibly they should give this guy that information? Wtf you slackers!

Kinda off topic, but howcome Qbasic didn't come on my Win 95 disk or Win ME disk?

[adosorken]

Kinda off topic, but howcome Qbasic didn't come on my Win 95 disk or Win ME disk?

Probably because you got some OEM piece of crap install disc.

[moochthemonkey]

stupid company computers

[relsoft]

Kinda off topic, but howcome Qbasic didn't come on my Win 95 disk or Win ME disk?

Probably because you got some OEM piece of crap install disc.

What does OEM means?

[KiZ]

Short for original equipment manufacturer, which is a misleading term for a company that has a special relationship with computer producers. OEMs buy computers in bulk and customize them for a particular application. They then sell the customized computer under their own name. The term is really a misnomer because OEMs are not the original manufacturers -- they are the customizers.

[relsoft]

Thanksies.

[Delta-G]

I can't even get to the part of my computer that will let me program in qbasic. Can you help.

Hello, I learned to program in BASIC in the early 80's. I recently decided to learn BASIC again. The first place I went was to the command line. But I've discovered that XP only has a CLI, not DOS or BASIC. The reason I thought it might be there is that when I first learned BASIC I had only seen command lines. If you didn't put a floppy into the drive BASIC came popping up. The first time I saw Windows you had to get to it by typing "windows" on the command line. Windows was another DOS program like BASIC. BASIC was built into DOS and Windows was built on top of DOS. But XP doesn't even have a trace of DOS. It has cmd.exe which is a Command Line Interpreter which uses commands and API calls to Windows in order to run older programs. This is all stuff I've learned over the last few weeks, but if I hadn't read it on the internet I never would have known. I was sitting on the command line typeing in old commands trying to find BASIC too. I mean, when I typed "edit" on the command line MS-DOS EDITOR popped up and worded just like I remembered it... I could start Monkey Island using the old Roland switches... why shouldn't I find BASIC on the command line too?

Anyway, I'm just writing to give some of you younger users a little understanding of those of us going back to BASIC.

The good news is that all of the old DOS tools can be downloaded off of the internet and will work just fine on XP.

-Delta-G

[na_th_an]

BASIC was never built into DOS. It was a standalone program that happened to be included with the DOS distro, but nothing more.

In older computers (mainly 8 bits ones) the OS shell was the BASIC interpreter. In IBM computers you had that casette BASIC in ROM, so the same thing applied: your OS was the BASIC interpreter. In that age, you had to shift to a proper OS to do proper disk managing (in 8 bits computers you had CP/M built in a ROM, for example in Amstrad and Spectrum computers). Sometimes you had a special command in BASIC to activate the D. OS, or you had commands in BASIC that called to OS functions, or maybe you just had to run it from a disk.

Later on, when MSDOS was adopted as the main OS for IBM computers, a slightly modified version of that casette BASIC was included in MSDOS as a standalone program (GW-BASIC).

If you want to start again learning BASIC, I suggest you to grab your favourite version at http://www.download-qb.tk . The "best" MSDOS version of MS BASIC has to be VBDOS, but if you want the old-fashioned style you can download GW-BASIC or the compiler BASCOM.

Anyhow, once you have "remembered" the BASIC language, I suggest you to try VB. It's easy and you can even get a life coding in it.

You don't find a BASIC interpreter in the command line 'cause the old QBasic that used to be included in MSDOS 5 and 6 is no longer there. Anyway you can download it and install it.

[Delta-G]

Yeah, that all sounds very familiar. I learned BASIC on Apple, IBM, and PC-Junior. It's all so very hard to remember. Probably better left un-remembered... things are much more user-friendly now. Anyway, I am very pleased to see what's been done with a language I thought would be dead by now.

[na_th_an]

Heh - BASIC is one of the eldest languages in use. From 1964 that makes 40 years of rock'n'roll and M$ is still developing Visual Basic (VB.NET). I guess we'll have BASIC for a long time