SINCLAIR BASIC SOFTWARE
SINCLAIR BASIC CODE

SINCLAIR BASIC CODE

But the resulting program was 5K in length, so Grant spent that August trimming the code.ДЄccording to Cambridge mathematician Steven Vickers, who wrote the subsequent versions of Sinclair BASIC: 'The ZX80 integer BASIC, written by John Grant, was in Z80 assembly code pure and simple, though it did use the usual stack based techniques for interpreting expressions.' Grant wrote the bulk of the ROM between June and July. To achieve the launch price of ВЈ79.95 in kit form, RAM was limited to 1K and the integer BASIC had to be crammed into a 4K ROM. Given the tiny R&D budget, 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.

SINCLAIR BASIC SOFTWARE

To this end, Sinclair had already met with John Grant of Nine Tiles in April to discuss the software requirements of the ZX80.

But the aim was to keep costs down, and that precluded paying a licence fee to Microsoft. Unlike the MK14, Sinclair's previous foray into the computer hobbyist market, this machine would ship with BASIC based on the ANSI standard. Sinclair was inspired to create the machine after seeing how much his son enjoyed using a TRS-80 but guessing that many people would be put off buying one because of the high price - just under ВЈ500. In May 1979, Clive Sinclair's engineers began work on the machine that would become the ZX80. So, not surprisingly, when the ANSI Standard for Minimal BASIC (X3.60-1978) was launched, it was based mainly on the Microsoft version. Microsoft BASIC became so popular that it made Gates and Allen their first fortune and was subsequently supplied with the majority of 8-bit computers. This was the first commercial version of the BASIC programming language, originally developed by J G Kemeny and T E Kurtz in 1964 at Dartmouth College in the United States.Д«y then, Kemeny and Kurtz had addressed the main criticisms of BASIC - that it lacked structure and encouraged bad programming habits - but the 4K and 8K versions for the Altair, written by Paul Allen and Bill Gates, were based on the original Dartmouth BASIC. In July 1975, Micro-Soft, as it was then called, shipped BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) version 2.0 for the MITS Altair 8800 hobbyist computer. Sinclair BASIC needs no introduction to enthusiasts of the little rubber-keyed machine, but its evolution is stranger than you might think.

Sinclair basic