Sinclair BASIC history: Difference between revisions

BASIC was first introduced at Dartmouth College in the United States in 1964. By the late 1960s, a version was available for practically every mainframe computer and larger minicomputers. It was one of the most widely available languages of the era. Efforts began to improve the language, as there were many complaints about its limitations from "real programmers", but these efforts dragged on. In the meantime, three variations became very common, Dartmouth's original which was found on most mainframes, HP's Timeshare BASIC which became the standard for most minicomputers, notably the DG Nova, and DEC's BASIC-PLUS.

The introduction of the Altair 8800 in early 1975 was a milestone event in computing history. In July 1975 Micro-Soft, as it was then called, shipped a BASIC for the MITS Altair 8800 hobbyist computer. This was the first microcomputer version of BASIC and the first commercial software for a micro. Microsoft, as it soon became, began licensing variations of the language for many popular microprocessors of the era, notably by the Intel and Zilog systems, and the extremely popular MOS 6502. Microsoft used a DEC-10 machine to write their BASIC, and thus their variation is most similar to DEC's variety. Not all platforms had MS-derived BASICs, notably the early Apple machines and the Atari 8-bit series had BASICs derived from DG, and thus have notable differences.

While this was occurring, the ANSI standard efforts finally delivered a product in late 1978, ANSI X3.60-1978. By this time, the number of machines running MS BASICs was far greater than all the others put together, and as most big-iron implementations of BASIC already met the standard, it ultimately had little effect on the market. Except...

In May 1979, [[Sir Clive Sinclair|Clive Sinclair]]'s engineers began work on the machine that would become the ZX80. Sinclair was inspired to create the machine after seeing how much his son enjoyed using a TRS-80 but guessed that many people would be put off buying one because of the high price—just under £500. Unlike Sinclair's previous foray into the computer hobbyist market, the MK14, this machine would ship with BASIC, based on the ANSI standard. But the aim was to keep costs down and that precluded paying a licence fee to Microsoft.

To this end, Sinclair had already met with [[John Grant]] of Nine Tiles in April to discuss the software requirements of the ZX80. Given the tiny R&D budget, [[Nine Tiles Ltd|Nine Tiles]] stood to make hardly any money out of the deal, but the feeling was that the project was exciting and worthwhile, and one the company would benefit from being associated with. To achieve the launch price of £79.95 in kit-form, RAM was limited to 1K and the integer BASIC had to be crammed into a 4K ROM. Grant wrote the bulk of the ROM between June and July. But the resulting program was 5K in length so Grant spent that August trimming the code.

The kit was launched at a computer fair in the first week of February 1980, and while it was not a massive success by comparison with the [[ZX Spectrum]], it turned Sinclair's fortunes around, eventually earning him a knighthood, and it sold well enough to persuade him to make a new computer, the [[ZX81]]. Work on the hardware had begun in September 1979, even before the launch of the ZX80, but it was the development of the uncommitted logic array, or ULA, which allowed the machine to go into production. The ULA, produced by [[Ferranti]] for Sinclair, reduced the chip count and brought the retail cost of the machine, in kit-form, down to £49.95.