In the era of vibe coding, when even professionals are pawning off their programming work on AI tools, Microsoft is throwing it all the way back to the language that launched a billion devices. On Wednesday, the company announced that it would make the source code for Microsoft BASIC for the 6502 Version 1.1 publicly available and open-source. The code …
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On Wednesday, Microsoft released the complete source code for Microsoft BASIC for 6502 Version 1.1, the 1978 interpreter that powered the Commodore PET, VIC-20, Commodore 64, and Apple II through custom adaptations. The company posted 6,955 lines of assembly language code to GitHub under an MIT license, allowing anyone to freely use, modify, and distribute the code that helped launch …
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Microsoft has open-sourced the version of BASIC it created in 1976 for the MOS 6502 processor used in many early microcomputers. As the software colossus explained in a Wednesday post, Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote the company’s first product, BASIC for the Altair 8800 microcomputer and the Intel 8080 processor that powered it, in 1975. A year …
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