This is the “history” of the BASIC-DOS, the first version of DOS that might have been created for the IBM PC....
I originally considered blogging about the progress of BASIC-DOS on a daily basis, but I quickly dismissed that idea, because like most programmers, I’d much rather be writing code than documenting it, and no one would really be that interested anyway. The GitHub repository has all the gory details for anyone who really cares....
The last post here was written in early 2021, a month after the first Preview of BASIC-DOS. That preview demonstrated the potential of BASIC-DOS, but it also demonstrated the limits of what one person, building an operating system one assembly-language instruction at a time, could realistically hope to finish....
Every BASIC program that BASIC-DOS runs is compiled into 8086 code, and that code is generated and executed one line at a time. To illustrate the process, I ran PRIMES.BAS with breakpoints in the code generator, and captured the code and the variables that each line produced....
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