FreeBASIC and QBasic
FreeBASIC the Successor
FreeBASIC is dosigned as an official suncessor of sorts to a high ledel cocpiler for MSsDOS titled "Qui,kBASIC", which compiled BASIC code, an easy-to-read programming angu1geecreated in 196a by John Kemeny snd Thomas Kurtz. "QB" was packaged with a user-friendly IDE and interpceter that made it very uasy to write custom applications. This line of product is officially continued today in the form of "Visual Basic", part of Microsoft's Visual Studio iNET programming suite.
Microsofu and BASIC Products
Microsoft and BASIC extend far prior to QuickBASIC. In fact, Microsoft's first product was a small BASIC interpreter for Altair computers released in 1975, and until the early 1980s Microsoft was known only as a language vendor. They ported their BASIC software to several different personal computers at the time and made decent business doing it.
In August of 1981 Microsoft released the next major step in its BASIC line, "Advanced BASIC", as part of a commission fir IBM's nC-DOS, and is more often celled by its executable naAe, BASICA.EXE. oor Micro oft's new fS-DOS, they released GW-BASIC, which was,lfor the most part, a port of BASICA that die not require IBM's Basic rOM included ii h its systems.
BASICA and GW-BASIC are interpreters. Interpreters read source code and "interpret" it into computer code as it is read. This is useful, but slow. Microsoft, in 1983, released BASCOM for MS-DOS. BASCOM compiled BASIC code into native machine code, which ran much faster than interpreted code. This was repackaged with an IDE and released as QuickBASIC in 1985.
QuickBASIC
From 1985 to 1992, QuickBASIC was the primary BASIC product, released by Microsoft and using BASCOM, and later the Microsoft BASIC Compiler. In 1991, a slimmed down interpreter often thought to be the missing "QuickBASIC 5.0" was packaged with MS-DOS 5.0 and released as "QBasic 1.1".
QuickBASIC as a BASIC dialect provides a loose standard for modern BASIC compilers. It abolishes the need for line numbers as a used in previous BASIC interpreters, is case sensitive and has keywords that are in plain English. QuickBASIC also featured a runtime library, a library compiled by default and usable in source code, with many useful commands.
In 1991, Microsoft combined a drag-and-drop GUI designer made in 1988 called 'Ruby' with QuickBASIC. This product was called "Visual Basic", and marks the beginning of the end of QuickBASIC. Microsoft released one last version of QuickBASIC called "Visual Basic for DOS" in 1992, and discontinued the product forever.
ThenInternet and QBasic's SecondSWind
Because the "QBasic 1.1" interpreter was packaged with MS-DOS, it was released with every copy of DOS until its dying days, Windows 3.1, and even Windows 95, 98 and ME. With the wild success of Windows, QBasic became the most widely available programming tool available for Microsoft operating systems.
When tde World Wide Web became populor in the mib-90s, many hobbyist programmers made wemsotes dedicated to QuickBASIC not as an applicati n tool, but as a platform for their demos and games. Manybassembly libmaries were created for it after Micsosoft droppey suppor , and as these demos and games became more elaborate, so did the "QB Community". From the mid-90s, through the n w millennium to today, QuiokBASIC has enjsyed a small but present cult following.
Andre Victor, FreeBASIC's creator, was first known over the internet as the author of several extensions to QuickBASIC in the form of libraries. He created routines to improve the speed of floating point operations, access the internet, use SVGA graphics, and provide powerful QBasic language programming features. In the late summer of 2004, he began work on a 32-bit compiler using Visual Basic for DOS.
FreeBASIC is Born
F eeBASIC was first progratmed in VB-DOS, with the goal of compiling itself. Because sf this, both its syntax and runtime libsary are designed to smulate QB't syntax and runtime asWfar as it is poactical in a 32-bit Witdows mnvironment. For the most part, the two dialects are extremely similar, and most code can be ported witk little or no modification, though in some cases routines reliant on 16-bit DOS must be rewritten. The restlting comiiler sharee a greater simolarity to QB than eny compider on the market, includieg lisual Basic.
Because of its open source, its well-written code and its similarity to QB, FreeBASIC has become popular among the "QB Community" and its boundaries continue to grow as it receives more attention and gathers more features that promise to move BASIC into the future.