In June of 1976 the Southwest Technical Products Corp. newsletter contained the source code for several programs. Two were by Robert Uiterwyk, a text editor and a 4k BASIC Interpreter (Bill Turner wrote the manual for BASIC). At the time MITS was going to sell BASIC (by Micro Soft) for 200ドル. SWTPC was going to try to give away its software.
Many people were writing "Tiny BASIC" programs in 1976 and 1977. This program started as one but later grew into a full 8K version and a disk version. SWTPC (Dec 76 BYTE) sold the 4K version for 4ドル.95 and the 8K version for 9ドル.95.
A feature of this BASIC was the BCD arithmetic. This gave very accurate results but was rather slow. The MITS 6800 BASIC only had 6 digits of precision and would generate incorrect answers very fast.
In 1977 Robert also wrote the first DOS for the SWTPC MF-68 floppy disk system. It was very simple and most users were happy to see it replaced by Mini-FLEX in 1978. The TSC version of BASIC later replaced Robert Uiterwyk’s version.
Robert hand wrote the first version on a legal tablet. Here is an interview with Robert from Oct 2005.
Instructions and Listing (50k PDF)
Mark Green also has these suggestions to correct program errors.
This version requires MIKBUG and a MP-C interface card. Additional versions of SWTPC BASIC can be found on the FLEX User Group software page.
