FreeBASIC and QBasic

FreeBASIC the Successor
   FreeBASIC is designed as an official successor of sorts to a high level 
   compiler for MS-DOS titled "QuickBASIC", which compiled BASIC code, an 
   easy-to-read programming language created in 1964 by John Kemeny and 
   Thomas Kurtz.  "QB" was packaged with a user-friendly IDE and 
   interpreter that made it very easy to write custom applications.  This 
   line of products is officially continued today in the form of "Visual 
   Basic", part of Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET programming suite.

Microsoft and BASIC Products
   Microsoft and BASIC extend far prior to QuickBASIC.  In fact, 
   Microsoft's first product was a small BASIC interpreter for Altair 
   computers released in 1975, and until the early 1980s Microsoft was 
   known only as a language vendor.  They ported their BASIC software to 
   several different personal computers at the time and made decent 
   business doing it.

   In August of 1981 Microsoft released the next major step in its BASIC 
   line, "Advanced BASIC", as part of a commission for IBM's PC-DOS, and is 
   more often called by its executable name, BASICA.EXE.  For Microsoft's 
   new MS-DOS, they released GW-BASIC, which was, for the most part, a port 
   of BASICA that did not require IBM's Basic ROM included with its 
   systems.

   BASICA and GW-BASIC are interpreters.  Interpreters read source code and 
   "interpret" it into computer code as it is read.  This is useful, but 
   slow.  Microsoft, in 1983, released BASCOM for MS-DOS.  BASCOM compiled 
   BASIC code into native machine code, which ran much faster than 
   interpreted code.  This was repackaged with an IDE and released as 
   QuickBASIC in 1985.

QuickBASIC
   From 1985 to 1992, QuickBASIC was the primary BASIC product, released by 
   Microsoft and using BASCOM, and later the Microsoft BASIC Compiler.  In 
   1991, a slimmed down interpreter often thought to be the missing 
   "QuickBASIC 5.0" was packaged with MS-DOS 5.0 and released as "QBasic 
   1.1".

   QuickBASIC as a BASIC dialect provides a loose standard for modern BASIC 
   compilers.  It abolishes the need for line numbers as a used in previous 
   BASIC interpreters, is case sensitive and has keywords that are in plain 
   English.  QuickBASIC also featured a runtime library, a library compiled 
   by default and usable in source code, with many useful commands.

   In 1991, Microsoft combined a drag-and-drop GUI designer made in 1988 
   called 'Ruby' with QuickBASIC.  This product was called "Visual Basic", 
   and marks the beginning of the end of QuickBASIC.  Microsoft released 
   one last version of QuickBASIC called "Visual Basic for DOS" in 1992, 
   and discontinued the product forever.

The Internet and QBasic's Second Wind
   Because the "QBasic 1.1" interpreter was packaged with MS-DOS, it was 
   released with every copy of DOS until its dying days, Windows 3.1, and 
   even Windows 95, 98 and ME.  With the wild success of Windows, QBasic 
   became the most widely available programming tool available for 
   Microsoft operating systems.  

   When the World Wide Web became popular in the mid-90s, many hobbyist 
   programmers made websites dedicated to QuickBASIC not as an application 
   tool, but as a platform for their demos and games.  Many assembly 
   libraries were created for it after Microsoft dropped support, and as 
   these demos and games became more elaborate, so did the "QB Community".  
   From the mid-90s, through the new millennium to today, QuickBASIC has 
   enjoyed a small but present cult following.  

   Andre Victor, FreeBASIC's creator, was first known over the internet as 
   the author of several extensions to QuickBASIC in the form of libraries. 
   He created routines to improve the speed of floating point operations, 
   access the internet, use SVGA graphics, and provide powerful QBasic 
   language programming features.  In the late summer of 2004, he began 
   work on a 32-bit compiler using Visual Basic for DOS.

FreeBASIC is Born
   FreeBASIC was first programmed in VB-DOS, with the goal of compiling 
   itself.  Because of this, both its syntax and runtime library are 
   designed to emulate QB's syntax and runtime as far as it is practical in 
   a 32-bit Windows environment.  For the most part, the two dialects are 
   extremely similar, and most code can be ported with little or no 
   modification, though in some cases routines reliant on 16-bit DOS must 
   be rewritten.  The resulting compiler shares a greater similarity to QB 
   than any compiler on the market, including Visual Basic.

   Because of its open source, its well-written code and its similarity to 
   QB, FreeBASIC has become popular among the "QB Community" and its 
   boundaries continue to grow as it receives more attention and gathers 
   more features that promise to move BASIC into the future.

