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

I wonder if you might be making unwarranted assumptions about the extent of what is encompassed by the emulation. It’s at least plausible that the state of the emulation required for implementing the APL interpreter was missing some non-trivial set of features required by the BASIC interpreter. It’s also worth considering, as you point out, that perhaps the BASIC inerpreter depended on some OS services. APL\360 had originally been its own standalone timesharing environment. I’m unsure of whether that situation was fully at an end by the time of APL\360 on DOS and MVT (1969ish) but I don’t doubt the standalone code was likely still reasonably fresh by the time work was underway on the 5100. The S/3 BASIC may have been in a more reasonable state for adapting to standalone operation on the 5100. I haven’t kept up with all the scholarship around the history of the 5100 but it’s also not exactly implausible that there was some phase of the project where the thing had been two separate products. ok bear.