Integer BASIC

Integer BASIC, also called Apple BASIC, was an early BASIC interpreter created by Steve Wozniak for the Apple I computer and the original release of the Apple II computer.
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==History==
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After working on the video game hardware of Breakout with Steve Jobs at Atari in 1975,A Breakout Story by Ethan Johnson, The History of How We Play. 2018-12-29. Wozniak started work on Game BASIC so he could write games in software without resorting to machine language. Wozniak assembled folders of papers for his BASIC design, which was based on a developed for minicomputers by Hewlett-Packard, where Wozniak worked at the time.How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch by Steve Wozniak, Gizmodo. 2014-05-01. Wozniak designed the Apple I around this implementation of BASIC,Integer BASIC, MEMIM Encyclopedia. Accessed 2020-02-15. but was unable to afford a compiler at the time, so he the instructions which he coded directly into machine language for the MOS 6502 processor.Restoring Woz's Original Apple BASIC by James Grahame, Retro Thing. 2008-07-16. The first program that Wozniak tested on the Apple I's BASIC interpreter was an early ; the source code had already been ported to for the C minicomputer.Steve Wozniak: Star Trek Inspired The Founding Of Apple, TrekMovie.com. 2017-04-20.
In 1976, Apple BASIC was provided to Apple I owners on a cassette tape that took about 30 seconds to load.Apple BASIC by Tom Owad, Apple Fritter. 2004-05-27. Because the standard configuration of the Apple I only contained 4KB of RAM, Wozniak did not have enough room to implement , which he said also saved himself a few weeks' worth of development time. As games at the time mainly relied on integer functions, he implemented a small virtual machine called "Sweet 16" to support 16-bit integers. However, it was not compatible with the dialect of that Bill Gates had based on 's .
Apple BASIC was included directly in the ROM of the Apple II computer, released in 1977. Because scientific users requested floating-point support, Wozniak included routines that could be called from the ROMs, but did not have time to integrate them into his Apple BASIC interpreter, which he considered to be the most challenging part of designing the Apple I and II computers. Apple Computer then turned to Microsoft to adapt their version of BASIC, which supported floating-point instructions, into Applesoft BASIC.
==References==
==External links==
*Integer BASIC at Apple II History
*Integer BASIC Reference at Landsnail
*Integer BASIC at MEMIM Encyclopedia
* at Wikipedia
Category:Apple software
Category:Programming languages
Category:1976 introductions