Re: Inspired by cp/m
>>There may be many BASICs but there are only vague similarities between most of them.
> Wrong.
I would suggest that you are rather limited in your knowledge of the many varieties of what are called 'BASIC's. Portability between them is not one of their strengths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BASIC_dialects
>>The "most portable programming language" for CP/M (and later MS-DOS) was COBOL,
> Wrong
I am not sure of what you calling 'wrong'. COBOL, at the time, was one of the most portable of languages. In many cases, such as with RM COBOL, it was not even necessary to recompile to move an application between completely different systems, just get the appropriate runtime, it was byte coded.
In the late 70s I used MicroFocus, RM and Microsoft COBOL on CP/M, MP/M, OaSys, DRX and later on MS-DOS, Xenix, Unix and others. Moving code between these was not a problem at all.
>>Tim Paterson worked
> Time Paterson wes making machines running MS BASIC. And by the time BSD started (with Pascal), BASIC was already well entrenched in business.
I suspect that you really meant UCSD Pascal.
SCP made machines, such as the Zebra CP/M and MP/M range, that could run Microsoft COBOL, Microsoft Pascal, and very many other languages.
While there were quite a number of applications written in various BASICs the serious business ones were mostly done in 'commercial BASICs' : Pick BASIC, cBASIC2. It was necessary to rewrite code between these and several other BASICs in common use.
> You shouldn't make such simple mistakes. It will confuse readers who weren't actually there at the time.
You seem to have had a very limited exposure to the range of products available at the time. Just MS-BASIC was it ?