[cctalk] Re: Looking for IBM System/3 BASIC book

Thank you Henk, no I hadn't come across that system3/basic folder at bitsavers. But it is exactly what I was looking for! One intent was to try to verify that indeed the IBM 5100 is running the same "version" of BASIC as was on the native System/3 itself, and approximately when that version of BASIC was available (which seems to be 1971). Although we confirmed the 5100 is (when in "BASIC mode") running the S/3 emulation (we found the instruction jump table in the ROM), I was never really sure where that BASIC code had come from (the one implemented using S/3 instructions). [ now it might be interesting to do a hex comparison of the actual S/3 native BASIC -- what that S/3 emulator is running, and what we've extracted out of the IBM 5100; note the 5100 arranges things in 6KB segments, not every segment is fully used but code generally does straddle across two segments -- but the size is approximately 54KB, which any early microcomputer would struggle to handle that ] Cory is doing a talk about BASIC at June VCF - mostly from the microcomputer perspective, but I wasn't sure if he'd be interested in touching on any pre-1975 aspects (aside from its Dartmouth origin). The S/3 isn't quite a "boot to BASIC" system -- I was curious on the process of how it BASIC was started on this system, and page 12-14 of that Guide to BASIC PDF in the link you provided describes exactly that sequence (which I see followed in your example1/2.txt outputs-- any chance that S/3 emulator runs on a PC? Imagine a MAME front end with a Model 6 CRT depicted). Anyway, it leads to a question of what was the first boot-to-BASIC system? And tentatively I'm thinking that might have been the Wang 2200 (but I've no idea what the "lineage" of the Wang 2200 BASIC was). Yes, yes, there was the HP9830 (if the BASIC ROM cartridge was inserted) - sales of both systems seemed to have started really in '74. Thanks! Steve On Wed, May 7, 2025 at 12:43 AM Henk Stegeman via cctalk < cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote: