21 Facts About Tiny BASIC

Tiny BASIC is a family of dialects of the BASIC programming language that can fit into 4 or fewer KBs of memory.

Tiny BASIC was designed in response to the open letter published by Bill Gates complaining about users pirating Altair BASIC, which sold for $150.

Tiny BASIC was intended to be a completely free version of BASIC that would run on the same early microcomputers.

Tiny BASIC was released as a specification, not an implementation, published in the September 1975 issue of the People's Computer Company newsletter.

Tiny BASIC implementations are still used today, for programming microcontrollers such as the Arduino.

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Tiny BASIC approached Dennis Allison, a member of the Computer Science faculty at Stanford University, to write a specification for a version of BASIC that would fit in 2 to 3 kilobytes of memory.

Tiny BASIC was designed to use as little memory as possible, and this is reflected in the paucity of features as well as details of its interpreter system.

Design Note specified a virtual machine, in which the Tiny BASIC interpreter is itself run on a virtual machine interpreter.

The choice of a virtual machine approach economized on memory space and implementation effort, although the Tiny BASIC programs run thereon were executed somewhat slowly.

Some programmers, such as Fred Greeb with DTB, treated the IL program as pseudocode for the algorithm to implement in assembly language; Denver Tiny BASIC did not use a virtual machine, but it did closely follow the IL program.

Tiny BASIC was first published in a newsletter offshoot of the People's Computer Company, a newsletter which became Dr Dobb's Journal, a long-lived computing magazine.

Tiny BASIC was not distributed under any formal form of copyleft distribution terms but was presented in a context where source code was being shared and modified.

Tiny BASIC encouraged others to adapt his source code and publish their adaptions, as with Roger Rauskolb's version of PATB published in Interface Age.

Tiny BASIC himself published a third version in PCC's Reference Book of Personal and Home Computing.

Wang wrote a STARTREK program in his Tiny BASIC that appeared in the July 1976 issue of the People's Computer Company Newsletter.

Palo Alto Tiny BASIC was adapted for many other implementations, including Level I BASIC, BASIC for the Sharp PC-1211 pocket computer, and Astro BASIC.

Tiny BASIC later expanded the language to 4K, adding support for floating point; this implementation was unique among BASIC interpreters by using Binary Coded Decimal to 9 digits of precision, with a range up to 10, and by being published for free as a "Floppy ROM" magazine insert.

The Tiny BASIC initiative started in response to the $150 charge for Altair 4K BASIC.

Integer Tiny BASIC was originally published on Compact Cassette in 1976.

Tiny BASIC implementations have been adapted for processor control and for microcontrollers such as the Arduino:.

In 2002, Emmanuel Chailloux, Pascal Manoury and Bruno Pagano published a Tiny BASIC in Developing Applications with Objective Caml as an example Objective Caml application.