Wherever I have DOS (generically speaking) installed, I always include a copy of "bywater basic." It's a tribute to what home computing was, once upon a time. I suspect there are many here who remember first coming upon Ted Campbell's note at the end of his documentation for the interpreter. For anyone who doesn't remember, please allow me to offer the story that stopped some of us in our tracks, back in the day . . . .
* THE STORY OF BYWATER BASIC This program was originally begun in 1982 by my grandmother, Mrs. Verda Spell of Beaumont, TX. She was writing the program using an ANSI C compiler on an Osborne I CP/M computer and although my grandfather (Lockwood Spell) had bought an IBM PC with 256k of RAM my grandmother would not use it, paraphrasing George Herbert to the effect that "He who cannot in 64k program, cannot in 512k." She had used Microsoft BASIC and although she had nothing against it she said repeatedly that she didn't understand why Digital Research didn't "sue the socks off of Microsoft" for version 1.0 of MSDOS and so I reckon that she hoped to undercut Microsoft's entire market and eventually build a new software empire on the North End of Beaumont. Her programming efforts were cut tragically short when she was thrown from a Beaumont to Port Arthur commuter train in the summer of 1986. I found the source code to bwBASIC on a single-density Osborne diskette in her knitting bag and eventually managed to have it all copied over to a PC diskette. I have revised it slightly prior to this release. You should know, though, that I myself am an historian, not a programmer. * I used DOS and BASIC to write a gradebook program for my wife, a 7th grade science teacher. As computer programs go, mine sucked big time. It did not have any graphic interface, just the code and a place to key in the grades. But because it worked and was such a big help to my wife, she wanted to show it to everybody that came to the house. I could only cringe in embarrassment and beg her not to do so. Nevertheless, after programming in COBOL on a mainframe for fifteen years, a home computer and DOS offered an incredible level of excitement. I was living where history was taking place. But there is more than just nostalgia involved here. I wish I could articulate the valid things that are surrendered with the demise of computing at that level. Fortunately, people who invest time and energy into the use of FREEDOS understand what it is that I am unable to convey. Al Whealton
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