Tiny BASIC

Tiny BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language that can fit into as little as 2 or 3 KB of memory. This small size made it invaluable in the early days of microcomputers in the mid-1970s, when typical memory size was only 4 to 8 KB. To meet these strict size limits, math was purely integer based and it lacked arrays.

The language was written, in part, as an alternative to Microsoft BASIC. MS BASIC would also run in 4 KB machines, but left only 790 bytes free for the programs. More free space was a significant advantage of Tiny BASIC. Piracy of MS BASIC led Bill Gates to publish an open letter complaining about people "stealing" BASIC, which further helped drive the popularity of this alternative.

Tiny BASIC was published in a newsletter offshoot of the People's Computer Company. Dozens of versions were created for almost every platform of the era, and there were many variations and additions that were published over time. The newsletter eventually became Dr. Dobb's Journal, a long-lived computing magazine. Tiny BASIC is an example of a free software project that existed before the free software movement.

An early free software project

The use of "Copyleft; All Wrongs Reserved" in 1976

Dennis Allison, a member of the Computer Science faculty at Stanford University, wrote a specification for a simple version of the BASIC programming language.^[1] He was urged to create the standard by Bob Albrecht of the Homebrew Computer Club, who had seen BASIC on minicomputers and felt it would be the perfect match for new machines like the MITS Altair 8800, which had been released in January 1975.

Allison's proposed design only used integer arithmetic and did not support arrays. The goal was for the program to fit in 2 to 3 kilobytes of memory. The first version was published by the People's Computer Company in a separate newsletter format known as the "Tiny BASIC Journal", or in its full name, "Dr. Dobb's Tiny BASIC Journal: Calisthenics & Orthodontia, Running Light Without Overbyte". The first issue was released in January 1976, at which point other programmers began modifying the code and sending the results back to be published in future issues, or sending it to other magazines like Interface Age. As the scope of the original newsletter expanded, it eventually became known simply as Dr. Dobb's Journal.

Dick Whipple and John Arnold wrote an interpreter that required only 3K of RAM. By the middle of 1976, Tiny BASIC interpreters were available for the Intel 8080, the Motorola 6800 and MOS Technology 6502 processors. This was a forerunner of the free software community's collaborative development before the internet allowed easy transfer of files, and was an example of a free software project before the free software movement.^[2] Computer hobbyists would exchange paper tapes, cassettes or even retype the files from the printed listings.^[3]

Jim Warren, editor of Dr. Dobb's, wrote in the July 1976 ACM Programming Language newsletter about the motivations and methods of this successful project. He started with this: "There is a viable alternative to the problems raised by Bill Gates in his irate letter to computer hobbyists concerning 'ripping off' software. When software is free, or so inexpensive that it's easier to pay for it than to duplicate it, then it won't be 'stolen'." The Bill Gates letter was written to make software into products. The alternative method was to have an experienced professional do the overall design and then outline an implementation strategy. Knowledgeable amateurs would implement the design for a variety of computer systems. Warren predicted this strategy would be continued and expanded.^[3]

The May 1976 issue of Dr. Dobbs had Li-Chen Wang's Palo Alto Tiny BASIC for the Intel 8080 microprocessor. The listing began with the usual title, author's name and date but it also had "@COPYLEFT ALL WRONGS RESERVED".^[4] A fellow Homebrew Computer Club member, Roger Rauskolb, modified and improved Li-Chen Wang's program and this was published in the December 1976 issue of Interface Age magazine.^[5] Roger added his name and preserved the COPYLEFT Notice. Other versions of Tiny BASIC existed, such as the one written by Thomas F. Waitman in 1976 for the Hewlett-Packard HP-2640 and HP-2645 terminals (which used the Intel 8008 and 8080 processors where the 8080 ran the Tiny BASIC interpreter). Thomas F. Waitman wrote articles for the Hewlett-Packard Journal.

Tiny BASIC grammar

The grammar is listed below in Backus-Naur form.^[6] In the listing, an asterisk ("*") denotes zero or more of the object to its left — except for the first asterisk in the definition of "term", which is the multiplication operator; parentheses group objects; and an epsilon ("ε") signifies the empty set. As is common in computer language grammar notation, the vertical bar ("|") distinguishes alternatives, as does their being listed on separate lines. The symbol "CR" denotes a carriage return (usually generated by a keyboard's "Enter" key). A BREAK from the console will interrupt execution of the program.

    line ::= number statement CR | statement CR
 
    statement ::= PRINT expr-list
                  IF expression relop expression THEN statement
                  GOTO expression
                  INPUT var-list
                  LET var = expression
                  GOSUB expression
                  RETURN
                  CLEAR
                  LIST
                  RUN
                  END
 
    expr-list ::= (string|expression) (, (string|expression) )*
 
    var-list ::= var (, var)*
 
    expression ::= (+|-|ε) term ((+|-) term)*
 
    term ::= factor ((*|/) factor)*
 
    factor ::= var | number | (expression)
 
    var ::= A | B | C ... | Y | Z
 
    number ::= digit digit*
 
    digit ::= 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | ... | 8 | 9
 
    relop ::= < (>|=|ε) | > (<|=|ε) | =

    string ::= " (a|b|c ... |x|y|z|A|B|C ... |X|Y|Z|digit)* "

Implementation in virtual machine

For some implementations, including the first Tiny BASIC and Tom Pittman's Tiny BASIC,^[7] a virtual machine was used, others such as Palo Alto Tiny BASIC and 6800 Tiny BASIC, were direct interpreters. In a virtual machine implementation, the Tiny BASIC interpreter is itself run on a virtual machine interpreter. The designer's idea to use an application virtual machine goes back to Val Schorre (with META II, 1964) and Glennie (Syntax Machine).^[8]

The following table gives a partial list of the commands of the virtual machine in which the first Tiny BASIC interpreter was written.^[9] The length of the whole interpreter program was only 120 virtual machine operations. Thus the choice of a virtual machine approach economized on memory space and implementation effort, although the BASIC programs run thereon were executed somewhat slowly.

See also

• Copyleft
• Dartmouth BASIC
• Palo Alto Tiny BASIC, by Li-Chen Wang

References

External links

• Tiny Basic User Manual and Experimenter's Kit – by Tom Pittman
• Robert Uiterwyk's BASIC and Robert Uiterwyk's Micro Basic – A MC6800 tiny BASIC later sold with the SWTPC 6800 computer
• MINOL – Erik Mueller's MINOL – Tiny BASIC with strings for Intel 8080
• TBL – A similar IL to Tiny BASIC's, used in the first successful compilers for PL/I, Fortran, etc., on limited memory minicomputers
• 68000 Tiny BASIC – Based on Li-Chen Wang's Palo Alto Tiny BASIC, and published in the 100th edition of Dr. Dobb's
• Tiny BASIC – A version for the curses character screen handling library
• tinyBasic – An implementation written in iziBasic
• Tiny BASIC – A live web version, ported to Run BASIC from iziBasic
• TinyBasic – A port of Tom Pittman's TinyBasic C interpreter to Java, C# and Adobe Flex. Includes live web versions.