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Comment by signal11 | Hacker News Reader

IIRC QBasic, which came bundled with MSDOS, didn’t have a compiler. QuickBasic, a stand-alone product, did have the compiler.

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I remember the excitement of being able to finally make my own .exe files with QuickBasic. It was like earning a new merit badge. First .bat, then .exe, then later using PC Magazine's "DOS Power Tools" book I started to write what I recall were .com files using assembly that was entered into some crude edit software that shipped with DOS. I kind of wish I would have gone deeper with that; instead I tried to dive into Linux and spent years trying to get just daily-user comfortable. :-)

>I started to write what I recall were .com files using assembly that was entered into some crude edit software that shipped with DOS

That must have been debug.com [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debug_(command)

When I was about 10 there was nothing I wanted more than to have a program that took minutes to build into an .EXE. In my mind that implied complexity and 'real' programming. Of course, as a professional 30 years later, waiting for compilers is something I could do without.

>> instead I tried to dive into Linux and spent years trying to get just daily-user comfortable

Ended up being the right bet though. :)

Did the same thing myself. Struggled for years in Slackware and other builds... had to write my own ADSL driver for broadband to work. Had a dual booting Gateway 2000 PC and always cringed when I selected Linux from the GRUB booter... but it served me very well decades later.

And actually, QuickBasic came first. It's final release was v.4.5 in 1988.

QBasic happened much later, 1991, as part of MS-DOS 5.0. It was considered to be a subset of QuickBasic.

So QuickBasic, as well as it's big brother, Microsoft Basic Professional Development System (which almost no one remembers), was essentially dead by the time QBasic was released.

I only ever used QuickBasic. I still have the manual. Can't make myself part with it.

You’re right. QuickBASIC was replaced with VisualBASIC for Applications (vba), v1.0 was for MS-DOS

I think you are confusing Visual Basic with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). The former is an independent programming language, the later is only for embedding into other applications (such as Microsoft Office). VBA is an embedded version of Visual Basic, it is missing a few features (most importantly the ability to compile to .EXE files).

There was Visual Basic for Windows 1.0 and Visual Basic for MS-DOS 1.0. The UI frameworks were completely different – Windows was GUI, MS-DOS was character mode. The Windows versions continued on until VB6, before being replaced by the very different Visual Basic.NET. Visual Basic for MS-DOS was discontinued after 1.0.

I remember the PDS!

I had it a stack of 3.5" floppies, and the last disk had a bad spot, so some of the framework was impossible to use because I couldn't install it.

That being said, the QuickBasic line and the PDS were amazing -- even the PDS had reams of online documentation on how to use the tooling, straight from the IDE.

I distinctly remember the days my Dad showed me the linker and the library managers. It was like magic: now I could re-use whole chunks of my programs in other programs. Totally world-changing for a little 12 year old kid on an IBM PS/2 Model 50.

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