Basica is not part of any DOS, but was distributed on the same disk as
DOS. I have no idea which version of DOS was the last to have Basica
attached.
Basica ran only on machines build by IBM. If you wanted to run on a
"clone", you bought GWBasic and ran the basica program.
All of these were interpreted languages. That is when ever you ran the
programs you created the code was "compiled" to run line by line.
IBM then produced a program which compiled the basica application
programs into an .exe file (.com file??) which would run on any clone
without Basica because the code was *all* precompiled.
IBM had a cassette version of basic in ROM code in all of the first
machines. You could not save on a disk.
Basica (basic advanced) maybe had references to the ROM code found only
in the IBM machines (not clones) (see below) *or*, as I rethink this,
maybe basica made references to reserved memory locations available only
on an IBM. That is what made GWBasic popular and necessary on other
machines.
In reference to the below, from Amano, to what machine did you copy the
BASICA which came from your DOS 3 disk? If the machine was not an IBM
something is going on that I don't know about.
John Wm. Ridge
JRidge@uwec.edu
On Fri, 8 Mar 1996, Keith T. Amano <keitha@kalama.doe.hawaii.edu> wrote:
>Isn't BASICA in DOS 3? I think that is what I needed to get some of my IBM
>ICLAS programs to work, so I just copied the basica from the old dos to the
>newer dos directory. THe programs ran fine then. There is also a note in
>the IBM DOS manual about a file called remline.bas that is supposed to help
>convert basica programs to qbasic. I don't really know much about basic,
>though.