Microsoft GW-Basic User's Guide and Reference (1989) [pdf]

Nice!

Do you have a sample/screen grab showing all the possible widgets?

Is there potential for interacting with a canvas? Could one make a drawing program?

JavaScript is a painful first language, full of gotchas. Even worse code bootcamps introduce it with react. I always recommend anyone starting programming to just make command line programs at the beginning in something like python. I might be wrong but at least it introduces a fundamental universal programming tool.

You are deliberately missing the point and confusing X with ‘something that looks like X’. For eg., using QBasic, you can pick some random spot on the monitor and have a white dot show up at that spot. What you end up doing is directly writing to the vga buffer address of that spot. That’s the X. You can directly talk to LPT1 and directly get the dot matrix printer to print an ascii character. That’s the X. All these things were possible because the synergy between the hardware and the software was extreme. QBasic was just a shim. You were directly talking to the hardware in as few steps as you possibly could. The assembler code for your BAS file could be inspected and you could even muck with that.

All of that has gone out the door. What you have with javascript is something that looks like X. So I can use a html canvas element and get its drawing context and do an arc with the right parameters and fill and hide the scrollbar with some css and pretend that what you now see is like the X. But its not! To actually get rid of the browser window and only have the white dot, you would need a full blown electron install or worse. And it still wouldn’t get you to the X. We already had X. Now we have something that barely approaches X after a great deal of effort.This is supposed to be progress ?!!

You couldn't do anything without some kind of manual, there was no internet for reference.

But if you did have complete documentation that's all you really needed and you could do anything the electronics was capable of.

Sometime around 1990 is when I got my first computer, and it was one of those. Came with the wonderfully audible cassette recorder, boxy 5-1/4" disk drive, pair of joysticks and a couple cartridges. My parents bought it secondhand off someone. You never know, maybe your machine went to some kid, sparked a passion they turned into a career, and is still in some closet cherished to this day.

Pretty sure Windows comes by default with the Powershell ISE, although it's not developed further anymore. It also only comes with the .NET runtime, not the SDK. Installing VSCode and some extensions would get you pretty far though.

For PowerShell there is the PowerShell ISE (ISE.exe) which is included out of the box, I think. But that's a far cry from the simplicity of BASIC, of course. And I guess the modern equivalent is probably JavaScript in the browser, but that's a whole other can of worms for beginning programming.

do you know https://www.jbang.dev/ ?

btw. installing "java" is now very easy, you just need to install jetbrains toolbox, from there install intellij community edition (1 click), which installs a jdk for you with (2-3 clicks), when it detects that you need one.

>Each computer had BASIC.

And each BASIC was usually capable of direct hardware control.

That was one of the differences between different proprietary BASIC versions.

They each had the same "framework" but were enhanced with the extra commands or syntax to accommodate the specific hardware they were intended to be used with.

I would say that ROM BASIC, and even better combined with an industrial-grade ROM OS, was the desktop paradigm that should never have been compromised.

Too bad ROM chips were so much more expensive than floppy disk storage, so we got "Disk Operating Systems" instead and here we are.

Then as soon as the IBM PC was beginning to be well-adopted by businesses, no more BASIC ROMs for you.

After that BASIC would be supplied on floppy disk, and you would have to pay extra, if you even knew it had been the key to user programmability on everything comparable that went before, most of what was still out there.

Like Commodores, TRS-80's, Ataris, Apples, and all early IBM PCs up until that point.

But most people weren't going to pay extra for many reasons and the user-programmability of the PC, as well as it's widespread readiness for any PC to run anybody's BASIC program with no other dependencies, dropped to an abysmally nil level compared to how it was the year before. Never has recovered either.

Even though there was very little software yet that did lots of things that specific users might have been wanting to do, so with a desktop computer boom there was a need for more user-programming than ever. On what started out to be a universal platform, pulling those ROMs was like pulling the rug out from under the future as it was intended to be up until that point. With 20/20 hindsight it looks like billions in lost opportunities for PC owners or operators to make the most of their PCs across-the-board for decades. When you think about it, simplicity & availability, or lack of it, can be worth a lot and really add up over that much time.

But losing the integrity level traditionally needed for an immutable ROM OS, that truly had to be a finished product before release, had been the bigger blow to begin with.

"This is by design."

This is something I'm thinking about every now and then when my mind starts to wander - if I'd be teleported back to the early 80s, how much of an advantage would I actually have with my current knowledge. Just always knowing which technology will emerge and persist on its own is a huge advantage, paired with knowledge of what trends regarding end users come up when. That alone probably dwarfs any advantage you have in technical knowledge. 8088mph would blow people's minds back then, but being able to do that would probably not be the thing that leads to success, but definitely gives you a shit ton of intern^WBBS street cred. :)