[tracker1]

One niggle... Basic wasn't really free either. At least not QB45, etc. It's wasn't super expensive, but it wasn't free... Also worth a mention is computers themselves back in the 80's and early 90's costs as much or more than the cars a lot of people were driving at the time. I remember seeing a used XT in 1993 for around $200 or so, which was cheap enough, but state of the art was an 80486 DX2 66...

Today, you can get an entry level sub for Claude Code or Codex for about $20/month... and while that may be really expensive in some parts of the world, it's not nearly as bad as a single state of the art compiler or dev tools in the early 90's over the course of a year or two until the next version came out. Let alone something like an MSDN subscription.

[Maxatar]

This article is specifically about QBASIC, which was bundled with MS-DOS, and by extension Windows up until Windows Me. QuickBASIC is a separate stand-alone application that predates QBASIC. The two certainly shared a lot of similarities, but they were not part of the same product line.

Microsoft developed numerous variations of BASIC from Altair BASIC, MBASIC, GWBASIC, PDS BASIC, and of course the most well known of them all, Visual Basic.

QBASIC was the only of these that was "free" in the sense that it came bundled as part of the operating system, and never sold as a stand-alone product.

[themadturk]

GWBASIC was bundled (free) with MS-DOS before QBASIC was made available (DOS 5, if I remember right).

[queenkjuul]

BASIC was included with every 80s micro, and using QBASIC on an XT wouldn't be that different than on a 486. 286s and 386s were in widespread use in offices well into the 90s.

$20/mo for 5 years is over $1000, and you still need hardware on top of that. Vs buying a secondhand computer and using books from the library, it's not cheap.