[tdeck]

In case anyone is curious about those radio experiments, OP is talking about Basicode:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE?wprov=sfla1

They also invented a kind of internal DSL within BASIC to get around inconsistencies in various BASIC dialects used by different platforms at the time.

[PhasmaFelis]

That is amazing. Different manufacturers' dialects of basic were barely the same language. I think the only things generally held in common were basic logic and control flow, very basic string manipulation, printing characters line-by-line, and prompting the user to enter a string. It sounds like these guys essentially created a shared function library (libraries and functions were completely alien to BASIC!) and successful ported that library to a couple of dozen different computers, some of them with only 16KB of RAM.

(Technically functions were supported in some dialects at least, but they had to fit on one line and could only do mathematical operations, so they would be useless here.)