Welcome to everyBASIC

This website has the futile, unattainable, lifelong and pedantic purpose of gathering bits of information and reference about every known implementation of the BASIC language — from the one that run on the GE-235 mainframe at the Dartmouth College to that you can play with in a web page. Okay, maybe we let show a soft spot for that 1975-1985 golden age when BASIC pioneered and spread the idea that everybody can program a computer.

BASIC is supposed to provide a playground for beginners to experiment without needing to be structured or to know anything about software development principles. That's why it became so popular. The early adopters of personal computers were mostly untrained hobbyists who just wanted to "do something" without necessarily having to learn "the right way" of doing it. BASIC was meant to be a messy alternative to more formal languages. BASIC was meant as a place to start, not as a destination.

Claudio Puviani
in Facebook's BASIC Programming Language group, 2024-01-09

Much has been written about BASIC and its history, so the main parts of this site strive to be objective and somehow structured:

  • The Keywords Reference section compiles references from various books and online sources about statements, functions, commands and special variables found in different BASIC implementations — most of all, their variations, equivalences, relationships with other keywords and use scenarios.
  • The infinite BASICs section lists known implementations and versions of BASIC throughout history (and they are literally uncountable ones), in a sort of hierarchical organization of "families" and relationship with one another.

Some other sections are planned to be created soon.

This website is a wiki under open license CC-BY-SA-4.0. In the event of something happening to me, as once sung, its content files are also published (better said backed up) at GitHub.

In spite of being a wiki, I have had terrible experience with spam on this platform and I'd rather not allow self-registration for content edition, comments and discussion for the moment. Those who would like to contribute will be welcome to ask me for an account.

Fabricio Rocha, 2023-03-11 (launch date)