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Sounds like it should have had it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_BASIC#IBM_Cassette_BASIC

I still have my IBM PC (5150), taking up a lot of closet space.

I was thinking of using a framebuffer version of VICE as 'init' to boot directly to a C=64 environment.

I remember our school computers you had to start the machine without anything in the floppy drive to get dumped into BASIC.

Unfortunately it was a very limited BASIC. I guess there wasn't much space in the BIOS ROMS. It was pretty much always worth it to boot DOS and start GWBASIC.

> My PC XT didn't boot into BASIC, I wonder why.

Mine didn't either, it booted into DOS 3.0(?) and I got to BASIC by running BASICA.EXE.

If I had to guess, it booted into DOS if you had a hard disk and otherwise booted BASIC from a ROM?

Nah it didn't have a hard disk, and booting up without any floppies inserted resutled in an error message...