True BASIC: An Attempt at Standardizing BASIC by its Creators

Looking at the Atari ST version

Created by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth in 1963, BASIC was a popular programming language in the early days of computing. Originally BASIC was a single compiled language, but its popularity resulted in many different variants. Some of these became interpreters and syntax was subtly different between versions.

Then in 1975 Bill Gates created BASIC for the Altair 8800, the first popular personal computer. Because of the limited RAM that was available, and cassette-based storage this BASIC was an interpreter. Microsoft was formed with the introduction of this product and the microcomputer revolution had begun. Microsoft made sure that their BASIC was implemented for every new Microcomputer that was released and Microsoft BASIC became a standard, of sorts, even if plenty of other BASICs still existed.

By the mid 1980s, there were many BASIC variants, which were all largely incompatible with each other, even the Microsoft BASIC variants (due to platform-specific commands).

About this time, Kemeny and Kurtz decided they wanted to bring BASIC back to its roots and introduce a standard for a structured BASIC without line numbers and this product was called True BASIC.

True BASIC for the Atari ST

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