Microsoft open sources GWBASIC

[steven at malikoff.com]

Richard said
> You know, reading about this made me dig out the info I had on the Character Oriented Windows ("COW") library. I was reading some of the docs and it occurred to me that it operated much like Windows (probably Windows 1), but what I couldn't find were any "sample" programs or tools to build a
program based on the COW library. Does anyone have/know of a sample program that used the library? Was there an SDK for it or was it used only for Microsoft's products?
Reading this just reminded me of Visual Basic for MSDOS, which had a windowing system for the 80x25 IBM monochrome
adapter. I purchased it in 1992 but didn't use it very much, but I just dug it out of the back of a cupboard for a look.
One of the manuals says "Visual Basic provides a complete development environment for MS-DOS applications. You can
design the windows, dialog boxes, menus, command buttons, option buttons and other interface elements for a application."

Visual Basic for MSDOS was compatible with QBasic and QuickBasic and even had a forms designer. The diagrams of the
character UI screens in it are very similar visually to Windows 2, they sure made heavy use of the box drawing characters.

Steve.