GW-BASIC User's Guide (1987)

That's cool that they have converted it to HTML. I made a simple Space Invaders game in a version of GW-BASIC on our home PC a long time ago.

Before that we had a Color Computer 2. "Getting Started with Extended Color BASIC". https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Manuals/Hard...

I really liked the book. I was like 7 years old and it completely explains everything starting from what keys to press all the way up to graphics. And such cool little computer character illustrations.

My first language and IDE :_) By chance I had this thick beige manual in my household. Once, when I was a kid, I caught chickenpox. I spent a week or two in bed with GW-BASIC manual and an English dictionary. That's how I learned two most useful tools of my trade: English and programming.

I have this book on my bookshelf. I wonder how common it is for people to keep old books like these instead of discarding them. I also have "APL: An Interactive Approach" among others. It feels like more than a coincidence that these two books were given to me.

Interesting. I remember the German licensed version by Schneider (a computer manufacturer) that came with DOS 3.3 and the 286 my parents bought back then. I remember it as very inaccessible somehow, I couldn't make any sense of it at the time (I was 12 years old though and there was no Web at home yet). I learned Turbo Pascal then from a much better commercial book 1-2 years later. Will be fun to go back to this and have a look at it with all I know today.

I still have the manuals for QuickBASIC and Microsoft BASIC Professional Development System (full DOS compiler and pre-cursor to Visual Basic)

https://bsky.app/profile/david-cornelson.bsky.social/post/3l...

I still have a small payroll sub-system I built in 1991 that’s in production in Wisconsin that I created in the pro compiler.

Wow, just seeing the domain name alone is quite a nostalgic throwback already. I remember finding Thomas Antonis website through some German text adventure, written in QBasic, back in 2003 or so.

I think I browsed through this at one point, but I don't have any experience with GW-BASIC myself. I had a copy of QuickBASIC and a print out of Thomas Antonis "SelfQB" at the time. He also runs http://qbasic.de/ from where I downloaded and (much to the annoyance of our schools librarian) printed out a bunch of other tutorials as well.

Back then, Antonis website served as a very useful entry point to other sites and tutorials. I remember spending a lot of time following rabbit holes of link lists and web rings from there.

I remember having a paper copy of this when trying to learn programming for the first time as a kid.

Back in the early days of the PC, GW-BASIC was an important thing to have if you had a clone instead of an actual IBM. The IBM PC had BASIC in ROM, but the clones did not, so if you wanted to develop, or run some of the vastly available BASIC code, you needed GW-BASIC.

https://www.ardent-tool.com/tech/ROM_BASIC.html

I came across this Linux-based GW-BASIC implementation a while back, and it is awesome.

https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/jammy/man1/pcbasic.1.ht...

This was my first programming language. I built a text-based adventure game. Good memories.

I found that book in our bookcase one day and read through it twice before asking my father whether we had GW-BASIC somewhere. I ended up starting programming with QBasic instead. From there I went to Pascal, Visual Basic and eventually all sorts of languages. But that book was the start.

I learned programming on an Olivetti M24 using GW-BASIC. The M24 supported SCREEN 3 (a mode you do not see supported in this manual) that was 640x400 black & white. Good times.

Awhile back I wrote a Clojure program to take a PLAY statement from GW-BASIC and turn it into a WAV file. I used this site to look up all the details of PLAY.

My dad had that as a book, I loved it. I learned a lot from it. Later I learned that someone with experience could have propelled me forward much faster.

What did GW stand for?