For decades, fragments and unofficial copies of Microsoft’s 6502 BASIC have circulated online, mirrored on retrocomputing sites, and preserved in museum archives. Coders have studied the code, rebuilt it, and even run it in modern systems. Today, for the first time, we’re opening the hatch and officially releasing the code under an open-source license.
Discover the newly open-sourced Microsoft 6502 BASIC code
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This is BASIC M6502 8K VER 1.1, the 6502 BASIC lineage that powered an era of home computing and formed the foundation of Commodore BASIC in the PET, VIC-20, and the legendary Commodore 64. This very source tree also contains adaptations for the Apple II (“Applesoft BASIC”), built from the same core BASIC source. The original headers still read, “BASIC M6502 8K VER 1.1 BY MICRO-SOFT”—a time capsule from 1978.
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This is the version that shipped as the PET’s “BASIC V2.”
With the various versioning variants used for Commodore BASIC for the PET, this is using the new memory layout (“New ROM”), but is before the update of the garbage collection?
As in
- ??? …initial version (found on some preproduction machines)
- 1.0 … first version shipped with PET 2001
- 2.0 … new memory layout, verious fixes, working IEEE-488 support
- 3.0 … updated garbage collection for strings
- 4.0 … disk commands (and enhanced editor)
Or ist what is 3.0 in this list (since some versioning variants refer to both what’s here 2.0 and 3.0 as “2.0”, while others use “2.0” for what is here “1.0”)? – Which version of the garbage collector ist this?
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