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Microsoft's 6502 BASIC Is Now Open Source


alternative_right writes: For decades, fragments and unofficial copies of Microsoft's 6502 BASIC have circulated online, mirrored on retrocomputing sites, and preserved in museum archives. Coders have studied the code, rebuilt it, and even run it in modern systems. Today, for the first time, we're o...

alternative_right writes: For decades, fragments and unofficial copies of Microsoft's 6502 BASIC have circulated online, mirrored on retrocomputing sites, and preserved in museum archives. Today, for the first time, we're opening the hatch and officially releasing the code under an open-source license. The version we are releasing here -- labeled "1.1" -- contains fixes to the garbage collector identified by Commodore and jointly implemented in 1978 by Commodore engineer John Feagans and Bill Gates, when Feagans traveled to Microsoft's Bellevue offices.

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