Languages

François Lionet's AMOS BASIC, published by Mandarin Software in June 1990, gave Amiga owners a BASIC with sprites, bobs, scrolling screens, music and its own animation language built in. A compiler followed in 1991, then Easy AMOS and AMOS Professional in 1992, and a public domain library and user clubs grew up around it.

Andy Wright's extension to Sinclair BASIC, sold by Betasoft of Birmingham from late 1983. It added named procedures, ELSE, DO...LOOP, windows, fast graphics and a programmer's toolkit; version 4.0 brought the Spectrum 128's sound chip and RAM disk under BASIC control, and Wright went on to write the SAM Coupé's BASIC.

Mark Sibly's compiled BASIC for the Amiga, published by Acid Software of Auckland in 1992 and launched in Britain in 1993. It gave programmers sprites, bobs, the blitter, the copper, Intuition and inline 68000 assembler in one language, and games from Skidmarks to Worms were written with it. Its line runs on through Blitz3D and BlitzMax on the PC, and through AmiBlitz on the Amiga.

The BASIC in the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 is Microsoft's 6502 BASIC as Commodore had shipped it on the PET, licensed in 1977 for a flat $25,000. It has 76 tokens and not one command for sprites, sound or colour, so C64 owners learned their machine through PEEK and POKE.

Frank Ostrowski's GFA BASIC, from GFA Systemtechnik of West Germany, arrived on the Atari ST in 1986. It had no line numbers, named procedures with local variables, full GEM access and remarkable speed for an interpreter, and it became one of the ST's most widely used languages. Version 3 followed on the ST and the Amiga, then versions for MS-DOS and Windows.

A programming language for children, begun in 1967 at Bolt Beranek and Newman by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon and developed through the 1970s at MIT. Its turtle, first a floor robot and then a triangle on a screen, reached classrooms in the 1980s on the Apple II, TI-99/4A, Atari, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro.

MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten group launched Scratch in May 2007: a language whose commands are coloured blocks shaped so that they only fit together in ways that make sense. Its designers set out to finish what Logo and BASIC had started in the schools of the 1980s, and by 2024 its website counted more than 135 million registered users.

An extended BASIC for the Commodore 64, written by the teenage David Simons and published by Commodore in 1983 as a cartridge. It added 114 commands for high-resolution graphics, sprites, sound, structured programming and editing to the C64's bare BASIC 2.0, at the cost of 8K of memory and programs that would not run without it.

The BASIC in the ROMs of the ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, written for Sinclair by the Cambridge firm Nine Tiles. Each keyword went in with a single keypress and every line was checked as it was typed; the Spectrum version added colour, sound and graphics commands, and the Spectrum 128 finally let owners spell keywords out.

STOS, 'The Game Creator', was a BASIC for writing Atari ST games, made by the Paris software house Jawx and published by Mandarin Software in 1988 at £29.95. It topped the Gallup ST chart in its first week, grew a compiler, add-ons, cover-disk tutorials and a user community, and led François Lionet to write AMOS for the Amiga.