QBasic 4.5 Available for Download

While everyone else is getting all hyped about VS'05 Beta (which, I admit, is incredibly exciting), I'm going to take this opportunity to hype up one of my absolute favorite development tools: QBasic. While I haven't used this tool in nearly a decade, I still think it's great that it's now available for MSDN Subscribers. It may have been there before, but I'm pretty sure I would have noticed it ...

I believe QBasic is the best environment to teach kids programming. Visual Basic and friends have way too much overhead with windows, buttons, events, etc. Just think how hard it would be to teach programming a little game within the first lesson. In QB, with just a few PRINT, INPUT, and IF statements, you can write a choose-your-own adventure game with ease. As TheDailyWtf points out today, I think that's what kids really want to do anyway. That sure as hell was the first thing I did when I got my hands on GWBasic ...

4 Comments

  • qbasic != quick basic.



    Quick Basic was qbasic with a compiler. So you could compile your rems and gotos into an exe.

  • And of course, the Irony here is that back then I too yelled at folks who confused the two. Gahh!



    But, that aside, QBasic is still pretty good to learn in, as it's is free. QuickBasic, AFAIK, isn't free ... can you even buy it anymore?

  • Don't fret, you CAN still get QBASIC as well, it just isn't as obvious. Instead of looking in the Developer Tools branch, look in the Platforms branch. Under MS-DOS, grab the MS-DOS 6.22 self-extracting archive. You can then grab EDIT.COM and QBASIC.EXE from the "Upgrade" folder. Enjoy the nostalgia!

  • Ah, the blessed days when the OS was provided with a development tool in the box…

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