To be fair, Microsoft Basic practically was an operating system, in its day. It’s what many computers booted into, and sometimes the environment in which everything else was run from.
To be fair BASIC was not much of a deal. The interpreter is just a REPL. Very basic at it, hence the name. The BASIC was not invented by MS: they replicated it. The real operating system part was done by computer manufacturers. For instance it was Dragon Data that brought the "kind of" OS routines in the Dragon32. Floppy disk managment, I/O, etc. MS just brought the REPL and ... bugs.
Re:This isn't your father's Microsoft
by thaumasiotes on Saturday November 09, 2019 @01:01AM
(#21489908)
> BASIC was not much of a deal. The interpreter is just a REPL. Very basic at it, hence the name.
The language is named after its goal of being something easy to learn. It is a fairly contrived acronym, Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
Before they started creating business applications and operating systems, Microsoft was in the business of programming tools. Their first software was Microsoft Basic. Microsoft Basic was available on pretty much every major personal computer platform.
Thus in some sense this is Microsoft returning to its roots as a cross-platform programming tools company.