Sounds like it should have had it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_BASIC#IBM_Cassette_BASIC
I still have my IBM PC (5150), taking up a lot of closet space.
Re:Raspberry Pi Boot to BASIC
by thanatos519 on Thursday January 06, 2022 @11:49AM
(#29825953)
I was thinking of using a framebuffer version of VICE as 'init' to boot directly to a C=64 environment.
I remember our school computers you had to start the machine without anything in the floppy drive to get dumped into BASIC.
Unfortunately it was a very limited BASIC. I guess there wasn't much space in the BIOS ROMS. It was pretty much always worth it to boot DOS and start GWBASIC.
Re:Raspberry Pi Boot to BASIC
by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Thursday January 06, 2022 @12:10PM
(#29826281)
> My PC XT didn't boot into BASIC, I wonder why.
Mine didn't either, it booted into DOS 3.0(?) and I got to BASIC by running BASICA.EXE.
If I had to guess, it booted into DOS if you had a hard disk and otherwise booted BASIC from a ROM?
Re:Raspberry Pi Boot to BASIC
by bellyfullofbac on Thursday January 06, 2022 @12:20PM
(#29826460)
Nah it didn't have a hard disk, and booting up without any floppies inserted resutled in an error message...
This boots X11/Wayland and then an SDL app on top of it, I wonder what it would take to write a shell or init that the kernel loads straight after it's done loading itself up. Maybe The systemd folks can make systemd-basic...