[stkai]

The source code is such a fun read (for the comments). I found some source code for GW-BASIC, and here are two of my favorites:

  ;WE COULD NOT FIT THE NUMBER INTO THE BUFFER DESPITE OUR VALIENT
  ;EFFORTS WE MUST POP ALL THE CHARACTERS BACK OFF THE STACK AND
  ;POP OFF THE BEGINNING BUFFER PRINT LOCATION AND INPUT A "%" SIGN THERE

  ;CONSTANTS FOR THE RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR FOLLOW
  ;DO NOT CHANGE THESE WITHOUT CONSULTING KNUTH VOL 2
  ;CHAPTER 3 FIRST

Edit: GW-BASIC, not QBASIC (https://github.com/microsoft/GW-BASIC)

[ndiddy]

Fun fact, GW-BASIC was a descendant of the original Altair BASIC. The "Translation created 10-Feb-83" headers on each source file refer to tooling Microsoft had that automatically translated the 8080 assembly to 8086 (it shouldn't be taken as a build date since they were manually modified after that point). Besides GW-BASIC, source code for the 6502 and 6809 rewrites of Microsoft BASIC were available up to this point (see https://www.pagetable.com/?p=774 and https://github.com/davidlinsley/DragonBasic) but I believe this is the first public release of the original 8080 BASIC code.

[deathtrader666]

Shouldn't it be "valiant" ?

[roryirvine]

Sure, but in those days spellcheckers were separate apps - the most popular at the time being CorrectStar from MicroPro.

They weren't integrated into programming-oriented editors, and it would have been unusual to run them against code.

[jimbob45]

The best programmers I’ve known have all been deficient at spelling. I don’t know why it so uniformly appears among them.