Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code

BASICA the "A" stands for "Advanced", believe it or not. There were several versions. All in my experience shared one common feature, they would not run any of the BASICA software I had collected from shareware catalogues. Some will run under GWBASIC but they all seem to run under Prado BASIC which is a BASICA interpreter. The file is called P-BASIC.COM

GWBASIC was developed by the early Microsoft company. The manuals I have searched give no clue as to what the "GW" stands for. My guess is "Gates William".

QuickBASIC an improvement on GWBASIC. Line numbers were now optional and a compiler was included. Several versions, the last was 4.5. The online help is excellent and troubleshooting is more intuitive.

QBASIC an improved version of QuickBASIC which shipped with DOS 5.0 but now the compiler was no longer included. Can also be found on a Windows 95  (not 98) installation disk. Look under D:/Other/oldmsdos. 

I have had a email from Richard Gledson which sheds more light on the subject. He writes:-

For various reasons I happened upon your web site and firstly, I have no issues with the content, this is only background info.

Prado BASIC.  When I got my first MSDOS computer in the mid 80's (an AMSTRAD PC - what else) there was still a culture of "if you need something write your own program" which usually meant BASIC.  The source for everything at the time was bulletin boards and PradoBASIC was widely distributed as being "a clone of GWBASIC" - "almost as good as GWBASIC" . Hardly surprising, because it is GWBasic with the copyright notice changed to "PradoBASIC - please send $10 to ......etc"  This is really easy to do if you have a disk editor but back then a disk editor was really high tech, geeky stuff. This went on for some years until it was noticed that the code was identical, apart from the first few dozen
bytes, to GWBASIC and PradoBasic quietly disappeared. Somewhere in my archive of old stuff, I am sure I still have a copy.

GWBASIC - Legend has it that it is so named because when the MicroSoft developer first showed it, one of his colleagues said, "Gee Wiz, that's good" and G(ee)W(iz)Basic was born.

Richard Gledson