Qbasic For Mac

Whether you are a programmer by trade or not, chances are that you've heard at least once about BASIC being mentioned as the first programming language someone learned when first dealing with computers.

This is because more often than not, people that began using computers during the start of the home computer era had a limited choice of tools for making the most out of their new, quite expensive at the time, "toys".

One such tool was a programming language designed in the 60s which, because it was embedded in many of the new personal computers sold in the 80s, caught a lot of traction and became the weapon of choice for any programmer wannabe.

Although using it was as easy as writing your programs in text form and then running them with the help of the BASIC interpreter carefully bundled within the ROM memory of the computer, the need for a more powerful programming environment became quite evident.

Because of this and the fact that the boost in home computer sales coincided the DOS OS becoming more and more popular, Microsoft created such a tool, an IDE named Qbasic and designed to make it easier to debug one's BASIC programs and to take advantage of its inbuilt and real-time expression evaluation engine.

Although Microsoft has never released an OS X version of their Qbasic IDE, one can still use it with the help of this DOSBox based app wrapper, designed to allow any Mac user to run Qbasic without having to boot into their Bootcamp partition or to install Windows in a virtual machine.

After you have this little Qbasic wrapper installed on your Mac, you can launch it by double clicking the QB app in the "QBasic" folder created within your Mac's Applications directory.

This being said, despite the fact that Qbasic will start in a small sized window on your Mac's desktop and if you are not a fan of squinting at a blue little rectangle for tens of minutes in a row, you can always make it go full-screen using DOSBox handy OPTION+ENTER keyboard hot-key.

Moreover, once Qbasic is installed, you will be able to use all of the features available if you would run it on any Windows computer, with the added advantage of being able to use it on your Mac's desktop.

On the whole, although not a state of the art development environment, Qbasic might still be of use to anyone trying to get started learning a BASIC programming language variant or, most probably, to any teacher trying to get Microsoft's old and stubborn BASIC IDE up and running on a modern Mac computer.