Microsoft BASIC
foundation product of the Microsoft company
Microsoft BASIC is the foundation software product of the Microsoft company and evolved into a line of BASIC interpreters and compiler(s) adapted for many different microcomputers. It first appeared in 1975 as Altair BASIC, which was the first version of BASIC published by Microsoft as well as the first high-level programming language available for the Altair 8800 microcomputer.
During the home computer craze of the late-1970s and early-1980s, Microsoft BASIC was ported to and supplied with many home computer designs. Slight variations to add support for machine-specific functions, especially graphics, led to a profusion of related designs like Commodore BASIC and Atari Microsoft BASIC.
As the early home computers gave way to newer designs like the IBM Personal Computer and Macintosh, BASIC was no longer as widely used, although it retained a strong following. The release of Visual Basic rebooted its popularity and it remains in wide use on Microsoft Windows platforms in its most recent incarnation, Visual Basic .NET.
Altair BASIC and early microcomputers
The Altair BASIC interpreter was developed by Microsoft founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates using a self-written Intel 8080 emulator running on a PDP-10 minicomputer. The MS dialect is patterned on Digital Equipment Corporation's BASIC-PLUS on the PDP-10, which Gates had used in high school. The first versions supported integer math only, but Monte Davidoff convinced them that floating-point arithmetic was possible, and wrote a library which became the Microsoft Binary Format.
In the Microsoft BASIC family of 8-bit interpreters (Altair BASIC, TRS-80 BASIC, etc), features and commands inspired by DEC's PDP-10 BASIC-PLUS include: the single byte tokens for keywords, % for integers, $ for strings, 4-byte floating points Microsoft Binary Format, : statement separator, # for file handles, random file access (FIELD, GET, PUT, LSET, RSET), and more. Microsoft's BASIC builtin line editor, the EDIT command, was inspired by the TOPS-10 EDIT text editor's Alter subcommand.
Altair BASIC was delivered on paper tape and in its original version took 4 KB of memory.
“Microsoft BASIC” enters the record as foundation product of the Microsoft company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Microsoft, BASIC and foundation can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1201810. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “Microsoft BASIC” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.