from the April 1986 issue of PCM

By Richard A. White

An important question these days is what is BASIC’s place in the world of microcomputing? Over the past few years the IBM PC and its compatibles have arrived, followed by a vast outpouring of software of every description. Each machine comes with a BASIC language interpreter on its DOS disk.

It is likely that only a small percentage of these interpreters have been loaded for the purpose of doing programming. A much larger percentage have been loaded for the purpose of running some existing BASIC program. This only reflects that early microcomputer owners were as interested in the machines themselves as they were in running applications, while more recent purchasers are buying machines to run applications only.