For those of you who remember the OLD BBS, from 1982-1985, it was written in a modified basic that I called ComBASIC which has BASIC syntax and keywords but also had additional keywords for BBS functionality such as TYPE(filename) which would send a file to the RS-232 and screen paged.

I wrote ComBASIC in Z-80 assembly because there were no host programs available for the TRS-80 in the early days and the operating system didn’t know how to use the RS-232 port.  Also, Microsoft BASIC was painfully slow and I was able to get about a 40% improvement in BASIC interpretation speed, fix some bugs, and implement other things that were just too slow in BASIC.  Them were the days of “real programming”. 🙂

Well, those that miss playing with those old 80’s computers, I’ve got vintbas (Vintage Base) online now for your enjoyment on shellx.  To use it, create a basic program using any text editor, save it with an extension of ‘.bas’, and then run it as "vintbas program.bas".

Sorry no manual page was provided with it.  It’s actually implemented in Haskell, which is also available on shellx for your use.