Gw Basic

GW-BASIC was a version of the BasicLanguage available for early DOS machines. It came with the Dos Operating system.

GW-BASIC was named after Greg Whitten, an early MicroSoft employee. So says JoelOnSoftware at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles/TwoStories.html (I heard before that GW stands for "Gates, William")

The original IBM PC had BASIC in ROM, supplied by Microsoft. It also came with PcDos and a more advanced form of Basic called BASICA, but that worked only if you had the BASIC in ROM. GwBasic was the generic MsDos equivalent for non-IBM computers, and would work on almost anything that was BIOS and video memory compatible.

Sample GW Basic code

Here's some sample GW-BASIC code, which reads a string, then prints it out:

 100 INPUT A$
 200 PRINT "YOU TYPED "; A$

[The above is simple enough to work for most implementations of BASIC. The semicolon causes concatenation.]

---

CategoryProgrammingLanguage CategoryOldSoftware CategorySoftwareTool