OSes on the DEC systems, and the BASICs they ran

Software
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I’m working my way through the 101 games book. The intro blurbs for the games use different terms so I can’t identify which versions of BASIC they used. So…

Some say they are from RSTS/E. Is there more than one BASIC for this, or would it always be BASIC-PLUS unless otherwise specified?

Another says RSTS-11. Is simply the first version of RSTS/E? Is it also BASIC-PLUS or did it have an earlier dialect?

Another says PDP-11, can I assume one of the above unless otherwise specified?

Is there a difference I the BASIC for the EduSystem 50 and the lower numbered models? Will these always be BASIC-8 or did they have variations?

Thanks!

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Is quite different from BASIC-8. It has error messages, for a start. BASIC-8 gave you a list of lines plus a two-character error code. BASIC-8 also only allowed IF ... THEN line number.

For the PDP-11, there was also Paper Tape BASIC for small installations. It lacked many of BASIC-PLUS’s features

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In the seventies I worked for a company called
Telephone Computer Service. We built and sold a system called Pay by Phone to banks that allowed people with touch tone phones to pay their bills through a voice response system called Wavetech. The Wavetech was attached to a PDP-11 that was programmed in DEC BASIC. I wrote the program that was installed in four banks mostly in Ohio. Just poining out that DEC BASIC was capable of supporting real world applications.

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The pdp-8a that I used in 1981/82 was running OS/8 and OS/8 BASIC, IIRC. It had a VT-50, an 8" floppy, a loud dot-matrix printer and a very loud card reader. The BASIC was slightly unusual in that it used backslash instead of colon for the statement separator and SEG$() instead of LEFT$()/MID$()/RIGHT$(). I might still have an old, yellowed dot-matrix listing of SUPER STARTREK in my mess of an attic, but I’m not brave enough to investigate at this time.

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I’m guessing that if it doesn’t explicitly say that, that I’m safe to assume it was BASIC-PLUS?

It seems most of these were in BASIC-PLUS, which is a bit of surprise to me. But there’s also a lot more HP and Dartmouth programs than I thought too.

It’s a really great resource if you want to stress your parser. I’m surprised it hasn’t been uploaded before!

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basic-plus and later, basic-plus 2 which was compiled were the prevalent on PDP-11’s.

IAS, RSX, and RSTS/E were the non-unix OSes, ignoring RT-11

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I had a good friend at DEC when BASIC-PLUS first came out. DEC was keenly aware of what the language needed to offer for the benefit of commercial applications. Until then, most non-integer BASICs used floating point numbers exclusively, but BASIC-PLUS creators knew that financial institutions needed accurate, multi-digit, decimal numbers without the risk of round-off errors.

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Thanks for this work, Maury! Please do share your findings. I’ve always wondered about the BASIC dialects in the book, as there were so many floating around. (It’s almost as though standardization hadn’t been invented yet.) I imagine many readers were sufficiently motivated to simply translate the book’s games into their local dialect. I still can’t believe people typed in published source code, though it was likely better than the alternatives at the time. I have an old issue of Interface Age with a FloppyROM insert, not a floppy disk, but an audio recording on very thin vinyl. You’d almost need to be a hardware hacker to make that work.

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P.S. At least one source claims 101 BASIC Computer Games was originally published by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1973. The RSTS/E timesharing OS was released the very same year. Wikipedia keeps using BASIC-PLUS and RSTS/E in the same breath, implying the language was exclusive to that operating system (though another source claims Bill Gates used BASIC-PLUS on a PDP-10). Because books back then had a multi-month editorial cycle, it is likely that earlier DEC BASICs played host to a subset of these 101 games. I dare speculate that the PDP-11/45 and PDP-11/70 models required to run RSTS/E (the “E” probably stood for Extended Memory) were kinda expensive for schools (+), so TSS/8 BASIC is the most likely host for a lot of these games.

(+) Although I do remember the Northfield Mount Hermon prep school had a PDP-11 in 1976, I don’t remember what model or operating system.

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we used an PDP-11/34 running RSTS/E and were able to implement the games from the book. We used a teletype and all the high schools in the district accessed the same system.

we used to get into flame wars, running $talk to send messages between terminals.

this was 1976 / 1977

I believe the /E meant you had 22 bit addressing in hardware. So the OS could do some page offsets into memory to get beyond the 16 bit word size limits.

my memory may be faulty…