CAN'T GET TO qBASIC ON WINDOWS XP

[Delta-G]

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

40 years! That's older than I am! I hope you're right and VB.NET sticks around for a long time; I just made my first VB.NET application using SharpDevelop. It's actually taken about three weeks to download the framework, SDK, and SharpDevelop (luckily I have DAP). I was following the HelloWorld instructions and although it worked fine, I have no what all that junk on the screen means. I'm going to work through some QB tutorials for a while and then go and see if VB.NET makes any more sense. It looks like a great platform though... and free! Free and Microsoft are two words I never thought could go together, but it makes sense to give away the tools for a new platform they've put a lot of time and money into. While I was there (three or four weeks ago) I searched for "olddos" and found "olddos.exe" which installs QBasic and other DOS goodness when you run it. The text file identifies olddos.exe as "MICROSOFT Windows 95 CD-ROM Extras" and says to only use it along with Windows 95, but it's working very nicely with XP. This download is very small so I've had time to work with it. I actually found QBasicNews while Googling for tutorials.

[Delta-G]

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.

Yeah, if I remember correctly the IBM PCjr would boot to BASIC by default and boot to DOS if you had the DOS diskette in the drive before powering-on. If you had the diskette in the drive before powering on you just typed BASIC and it started. You could quit BASIC and get back to DOS. But if you hadn't started with DOS you couldn't just quit BASIC or even start DOS, you had to restart and make sure the diskette was in... I think that's the way it went. The Apples I worked on were a part of a school "computer lab" and I think BASIC ran a bit differently. The other IBM computers I learned on ran DOS and had BASIC installed. For some reason I've just always assumed BASIC was a part of the OS.