Page 1 of 1

Differences between 4.5 and 7.1

Posted: Sat Apr 19, 2008 11:33 am
by LightBulb
I have QBasic 4.5. I was wondering whats different between version 4.5 and 7.1. I've seen it for download online, but I doesn't exactly seem legally ok.

Posted: Sat Apr 19, 2008 12:48 pm
by sid6.7
yes its illegal but i've never seen anyone care about that...you can find all versions of QB all over the net.

i'm still a QB 4.X guy...but then i only do text type programming.

i'm sure 7.X is much better but i don't have it or even try to find it.

Re: Differences between 4.5 and 7.1

Posted: Sun Apr 20, 2008 2:23 pm
by moneo
LightBulb wrote:I have QBasic 4.5. I was wondering whats different between version 4.5 and 7.1. I've seen it for download online, but I doesn't exactly seem legally ok.
Basic 7.x has other names; i.e., PDS and QBX. Do a Google on "Microsoft.Basic+PDS" to see several Microsoft articles and lists of differences.

My experience: When PDS 7.00 first came out, about 1989-1990, my software provider lent me the complete package to test. It was a large box completely full of books and diskettes. My currrent Quickbasic 4.0 at the time only had 3 books: the Manual, the Complie & Link reference, and the Selected Topics. I could hardly lift the PDS box, and still don't know how many books it had.

The BIG new feature in PDS was ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method). IBM implemented ISAM on some of its mainframes back in the 1960's, and I had used it quite a bit. I loaded PDS on my machine and did some testing with ISAM. Only the name ISAM was the same. It didn't work at all the way IBM had designed it, plus it had flaws.

I couldn't find any other earth-shattering enhancements to Quickbasic 4.0 or 4.5 on this PDS, so I ended up deleting it from my machine and returning this behemoth package to the dealer.

Regards..... Moneo

Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2008 6:37 am
by MystikShadows
Acvtually,

PDS had ISAM yes. It also had the ability to break the 640kb barrier through the use of Overlays (which allowed 16 overlays of 256kb each hence 16 beg executables. Sure overlays were a patch to try to help but it was there. There are also statements in the language that helped with things like getting lists of files and folders in a specified path with the DIR$() function. I believe it had some exptra math as well financial math. and a few other language enhancements.

It also had a library for user interface (much like VB-DOS's only it was all coded not visually designed like VB-DOS allowed. But as moneo stated up here ISAM had flaws and was pretty far from the original IBM design.

Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2008 6:48 am
by Dav
Here's a little article from Microsoft describing some enhancements found in PDS 7.1:

http://kb.qbasicnews.com/Q65598.TXT

- Dav

Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2008 4:11 am
by OPRESION
MystikShadows wrote:...16 beg executables...
"16 beg" must be "16 Meg" (Whoops!)

Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2008 4:18 am
by OPRESION