Turing Award Laureate famously wrote his paper ( A Case against the GO TO Statement) discussing the issues related to the GOTO statement. It was indeed not much more than a decade before that Edsger W.

GW-BASIC however lacked a strong support for structured programming, as evidenced by the inclusion of the decried GOTO statement and the lack of local variables. GW-BASIC grew to include interfacing with joysticks, could communicate bi-directionally via COM serial ports, and play sounds.

GW-BASIC shipped as a fully self-contained executable and was bundled with MS-DOS operating systems on IBM PC, and represented an evolution in functionality vs. Microsoft Basic was however seen (at the time) as a powerful implementation of BASIC. There were for instance no functions addressing a large range of functionality available through output devices (like graphics, color, sound, or networking) or input devices (like joysticks or mice). Microsoft BASIC version 5 required a CP/M system with at least 28 KB of random access memory (RAM) and at least one diskette drive and offered very little in terms of interactions with external devices. GW-BASIC is a BASIC interpreter inspired by Microsoft BASIC. This means we will not be accepting PRs that modify the source in any way. These sources, as clearly stated in the repo’s readme, are the 8088 assembly language sources from 10th Feb 1983, and are being open-sourced for historical reference and educational purposes. Microsoft stated the motivations behind the new open-source release and the limitations it adheres to: After re-open-sourcing MS-DOS, Microsoft proceeds with releasing GW-BASIC under an MIT license due to numerous requests. Microsoft released on GitHub the original 8088 assembly language sources for its interpreter for GW-BASIC 1.0, a dialect of the Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) programming language released in 1983 and bundled with MS-DOS operating systems on IBM PC compatibles.

Gw basic sample programs download