{"id":42859,"date":"2025-09-04T10:34:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-04T10:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/42859\/"},"modified":"2025-09-04T10:34:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T10:34:07","slug":"microsoft-open-sources-its-6502-version-of-basic-from-1976","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/42859\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft open-sources its 6502 version of BASIC from 1976"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">After years of unofficial copies of Microsoft\u2019s 6502 BASIC floating around on the internet, the software giant has <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/microsoft\/BASIC-M6502\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">released the code<\/a> under an open-source license. 6502 BASIC was one of Microsoft\u2019s first pieces of software, adapted in 1976 by Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and early employee Ric Weiland to run on the 6502 CPU that powered the Apple II, Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, and Commodore 8-bit series.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">Microsoft\u2019s open-source release of 6502 BASIC is a throwback to the initial days of coding, as the software helped standardize programming language implementations and allowed some of the first developers to use a Commodore machine and learn programming by typing 10 PRINT \u201cHELLO\u201d and 20 GOTO 10.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">\u201cIn 1977, Commodore licensed it for a flat fee of $25,000, a deal that placed Microsoft BASIC at the heart of Commodore\u2019s PET computers and, later, the VIC-20 and Commodore 64,\u201d explains Microsoft <a href=\"https:\/\/opensource.microsoft.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/03\/microsoft-open-source-historic-6502-basic\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">in a blog post<\/a> announcing Microsoft\u2019s 6502 BASIC open source news.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">While 6502 BASIC and Microsoft\u2019s other early software projects helped with the development of MS-DOS and established the company\u2019s software licensing business model, interest in this early code and the MOS 6502 CPU is still very much alive nearly 50 years later. Preservationists and hobbyists have been experimenting with FPGA-based re-creations and emulator projects, and the 6502 BASIC code has also appeared in museum archives.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">\u201cOver the years, dedicated preservationists have reconstructed build environments and verified that the historical source can still produce byte-exact ROMs,\u201d says Microsoft. \u201cThis open-source release builds on that work, now with a clear, modern license. It follows Microsoft\u2019s earlier release of <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/microsoft\/GW-BASIC\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">GW-BASIC<\/a>, which descended from the same lineage and shipped in the original IBM PC\u2019s ROM.\u201c<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">If you\u2019re interested in experimenting with the assembly language source code of Microsoft\u2019s 6502 BASIC, the complete source code is now <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/microsoft\/BASIC-M6502\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">available on GitHub<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After years of unofficial copies of Microsoft\u2019s 6502 BASIC floating around on the internet, the software giant has&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42860,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[18,19,17,305,5,753,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-42859","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-microsoft","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-tech","14":"tag-technology"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42859\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}