In June of 1976 the Southwest Technical Products Corp. newsletter contained the source code for several programs. Two were by Robert Uiterwyk, a text editor and a 4k BASIC Interpreter (Bill Turner wrote the manual for BASIC). At the time MITS was going to sell BASIC (by Micro Soft) for $200. SWTPC was going to try to give away its software.
Many people were writing "Tiny BASIC" programs in 1976 and 1977. This program started as one but later grew into a full 8K version and a disk version. SWTPC (Dec 76 BYTE) sold the 4K version for $4.95 and the 8K version for $9.95.
A feature of this BASIC was the BCD arithmetic. This gave very accurate results but was rather slow. The MITS 6800 BASIC only had 6 digits of precision and would generate incorrect answers very fast.
In 1977 Robert also wrote the first DOS for the SWTPC MF-68 floppy disk system. It was very simple and most users were happy to see it replaced by Mini-FLEX in 1978. The TSC version of BASIC later replaced Robert Uiterwyk's version.
Robert hand wrote the first version on a legal tablet. Here is an interview with Robert from Oct 2005.
Instructions and Listing (50k PDF)
| I would like to thank Mark Green and Ed Hepler for
reporting the following errors in the OCR conversion of the source code
from
the June 1976 Newsletter. Michael Holley - March 2006 Corrected Lines
Mark Green also has these suggestions to correct program errors.
|
This version requires MIKBUG and a MP-C interface card. Additional versions of SWTPC BASIC can be found on the FLEX User Group software page.
