Category Archives: Tiny BASIC

Growing up, I taught myself to program BASIC on the TRS-80 Level I, then the Bally Astrocade and the Tandy Pocket Computer. At the time, I didn’t realize that all three were based on Palo Alto Tiny BASIC. PATB itself was inspired by the People’s Computer Company (PCC) “Build Your Own BASIC” project, created by Dennis Allison. What amazes me about Allison’s design spec is how streamlined it is: he defined his own programming language, IL (Interpretive Language), and specified his Tiny BASIC interpreter in just 124 lines of code! Back in 2017, I wrote […]

Martin Malý has adapted Version 2 of Li Chen Wang’s Palo Alto Tiny BASIC to run on his ASM80 browser-based assembler and emulator. I’ve uploaded the source code, with his permission, to GitHub. Background Palo Alto Tiny BASIC emerged out of the Tiny BASIC movement started by People’s Computer Company and taken up by the Homebrew Computer Club. Fellow members Steve Wozniak and Tom Pittman would develop their own BASICs (Integer BASIC and 6800 Tiny BASIC respectively). Wang analyzed the Altair BASIC code and contributed edits to Tiny BASIC Extended. […]

I learned how to program using TRS-80 Level I BASIC, a 4K implementation adapted from Palo Alto Tiny BASIC. I later used other Tiny BASIC implementations on the PC-1, Astrocade, and Apple II, not realizing how their origin stories converged. (The Apple II’s 4K implementation, Integer BASIC, was written by Woz, who knew many of the Tiny BASIC implementers from the Homebrew Computer Club.) I’ve been expanding the Tiny BASIC Wikipedia article this summer to reflect its rich history. Here’s what I contributed to the article. Tiny BASIC is a family […]

Our family friends the Hansels were the first to get a videogame system, the Atari VCS. I remember playing Combat, Breakout, and later Space Invaders. My dad was jealous, but he ended up getting us the Bally Astrocade. This turned out to be a great system, and its BASIC was far better than the Atari’s (the Atari BASIC Programming cartridge limited programs to 64 characters!). The Wikipedia article on the Astrocade didn’t have many details about its BASIC, so I added a section on the language. To that point, I’d […]

Back in 1980, I created a computer game for my TRS-80 Pocket Computer, inspired by Tunnels & Trolls. Given the passing of Rick Loomis, I thought I would dig it out. As with T&T, I had attributes: ST (Strength), DX (Dexterity), and CN (Constitution, used for hit points). But I skipped LK (Luck) and CH (Charisma), and I used D&D’s WS (Wisdom) instead of T&T’s IQ (Intelligence). Like T&T, and unlike D&D, attributes could increase: in my case, quickly, after every monster, rolling three dice and if the total exceeds […]

In the fall of 1975, the People’s Computer Company (PCC) poured more energy into their “Build Your Own BASIC” project, fired up by the announcement of Altair 4K BASIC by MicroSoft [as it was then] for $150. They wanted to create an implementation that was free for anyone to use. With microcomputers and microprocessors proliferating, they envisioned a virtual machine that could be ported from platform to platform: When you write a program in TINY BASIC there is an abstract machine which is necessary to execute it. If you had […]