Ok The Resurrection of GW-BASIC

GW-BASIC isn’t dead yet.

A Microsoft product of the early 1980s, GW-BASIC and its direct successors were loaded into more personal computers than any other programming language in history. GW-BASIC was a line-numbered, unstructured, loosely procedural high-level programming environment that immediately set you down in the thick of it: confronted with an Ok prompt, cursor blinking, the language interpreter made no bones about its high-level expectations of you. Algorithms, some just as complex as anything being coded these days, could be fashioned in GW-BASIC; program in the language now, and you’ll experience a particular type of joy that attends to a successful solution of a new-world coding problem that, samurai-like, you are somehow able to slay using an old-world unstructured language.

Mark Jones Lorenzo first wrote about GW-BASIC in Not Ok, arguing that reports of its death were greatly exaggerated–and proving it by offering a cookbook of engaging and cutting-edge algorithmic type-in recipes, earmarked for immediate consumption. And now it’s time for a second helping.

If Not Ok was the appetizer, then Ok is the main course, containing delicious recipes for even more complex programs that stretch GW-BASIC to its absolute limits while satiating the most discriminating programmers. Inside these pages you’ll find the ingredients for cooking up Turing machines, the Game of Life, tic-tac-toe, the card game baccarat, a slider puzzle, an analog clock, permutation and combination generators, a slot machine, the Tower of Hanoi, an “outguessing machine,” a decimal-to-fraction converter, a statistical bootstrapping routine, and several recursive algorithms, among many other programs–including playable versions of a handful of classic arcade games of a bygone era.

In addition, GW-BASIC goes head-to-head with an object-oriented programming language that’s more than just another flavor of the month: Java. Will the ragtag GW-BASIC hold its own against the unalloyed Goliath-like forces of modernity? Or will it finally succumb to the ravages of time (and a leviathan language), revealing itself to be well past its expiration date? The fate of GW-BASIC lies in your hands.

* GW-BASIC is a registered trademark of the Microsoft Corporation, which did not in any way endorse or assist in the production of this product.