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Comment by Newtonip | Hacker News Reader

My mom's IBM 8088 had GW-BASIC built into its BIOS. You could turn on the computer and go straight into it without having any storage medium present.

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Have an original IBM PC sitting here. It has a 5 pin DIN plug on the back to connect a casette tape drive. I also recall BASICA.COM on diskette leveraged the BASIC routines in the original ROM, so it was about 1/3 the size of GWBASIC.EXE.

Interesting. Was that the original IBM PC? I thought it needed DOS for some reason.

I've always thought that using BASIC as the default command line was really weird... Like on an Apple II or TRS-80. You could type in a command to load something from a disk or run a program, or type a line number to start programming. How did that make sense to anyone?? To my 11yo self, it was confusing and I've never changed my mind.

Yes. The original PC and PC XT had BASIC in ROM just like all the other home computers of the day. In its most bare bones configuration, you booted into BASIC and used a cassette tape drive for your storage.

I don't know how common that setup was - probably not very. The most typical stripped-down PCs were dual floppy (the hard drive was a premium), and booted either MS-DOS or CP/M.

If you already have a PL, why not re-use it as a shell? Those environments were very memory and storage limited, so it made a lot of sense.

That was actually “Cassette BASIC” written by IBM.

It was scary to see it when you didn’t expect to, because that meant something was wrong with your disk drives!

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