Business Basic is a category of variants of the

BASIC BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...

computer programming language which were specialised for business use on

minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, ...

s in the 1970s and 1980s. To the underlying BASIC language, these dialects added record handling instructions similar to those in

COBOL COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily us ...

, allowing programmers to build complex file-handling applications using what was at that time a much more modern programming language.

MAI Systems MAI Systems Corporation, or simply MAI, was a United States-based computer company best known for its Basic/Four product and the customized computer systems that ran it. It was later known for its computer reservation systems. The company formed ...

released the first example as

MAI Basic Four MAI Basic Four (sometimes written as Basic/Four Corporation or Basic 4) refers to a variety of Business Basic, the computers that ran it, and the company that sold them (its name at various times given as MAI Systems, MAI Basic Four Inc., and MAI B ...

in 1972, and several similar versions emerged through the 1970s. Business Basics added

indexed file An indexed file is a computer file with an index that allows easy random access to any record given its file key. The key must be such that it uniquely identifies a record. If more than one index is present the other ones are called ''alternate ...

access methods to the normal set of BASIC commands, and were optimised for other input/output access, especially display terminal control. The two major families of Business Basic are Basic/Four and

Data General Business Basic Data General Business Basic was a BASIC interpreter (based on a version from MAI Basic Four) marketed by Data General for their Nova minicomputer in the 1970s, and later ported to the Data General Eclipse MV and AViiON computers. Most busines ...

. In addition, the Point 4 company, which developed the IRIS operating system, had their own version of BASIC. The UniBASIC owned by Dynamic Concepts of Irvine is a derivative of the Point 4 BASIC. In the 1980s, Business Basics were ported from their original proprietary environments to many

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

platforms,

CP/M CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/ 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initial ...

, and to

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

. In the 1990s, some Business Basics were ported to

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

and

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

, and Business Basic

integrated development environment An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools a ...

s became available. Notably, in 1990 MAI's version was ported from their BOSS

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

to become the multi-platform Open BASIC. Business Basic continues to be widely used due to the very large base of application software.

References

External links

The Business Basic Page
*http://www.tbred.com/
Business Basic FAQ - Ver 1.10 (17 Feb 1997)U/BL (Transoft)
BASIC programming language family
BASIS International Ltd.
{{BASIC

See also

References

External links