Microsoft's 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025)

(opensource.microsoft.com)

48 points | by GTP 2 hours ago

5 comments

  • Smalltalker-80 27 minutes ago
    In 1979, I made a program called VisiBase in this BASIC. It's a visual database modeled after VisiCalc. That won me a joystick in at a competition by the local computer store. :-) Still have the source, that works in an Apple 2 emulator. It's 13 K in ASCII (untokenized).
  • rhdunn 40 minutes ago
    Ben Eater's 6502 series [1] uses MSBASIC for programming along with WozMon as the terminal interface.

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypFbtuVMUVXN...

    • BeefySwain 29 minutes ago
      Is that the same BASIC as this?
  • rbanffy 18 minutes ago
    Maybe Apple can finally release MacBasic now that Microsoft can no longer stop licensing their Basic to the Apple II family.
  • qingcharles 31 minutes ago
    Sadly nothing in Scott's blog post about how they obtained the source. Was it still in Microsoft's archives? Did they happen upon some tractor-feed print-outs they had to type in by hand?
    • chihuahua 13 minutes ago
      It would also be interesting why it was open-sourced now. I assume if they had done the same last year, the resulting loss of revenue would not have destroyed the plucky little $3T upstart.
    • bdcravens 13 minutes ago
      I assume today typing in by hand is no longer needed, with text parsing from images being table stakes for LLMs.
  • amichail 17 minutes ago
    Do you think computing history would have been much different if Microsoft made a 6502 Pascal interpreter instead?
    • xxs 14 minutes ago
      Pascal is a lot broader language and won't fit in sub 16KB of ROM (even if you exclude monitor [call-151])
      • amichail 2 minutes ago
        Maybe they could have implemented a useful subset of Pascal.