QuickBASICs

QuickBASICs is not an official product name but a colloquial label used to describe the QuickBASIC ecosystem, including the language dialect, the integrated development environment, and the community that formed around it in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The term also covers the collections of programs and libraries written for QuickBASIC and shared through magazines, BBSs, and user groups.

QuickBASIC itself is a dialect of the BASIC programming language released by Microsoft as an evolution of GW-BASIC and QBASIC. It provided an integrated environment with an editor, a built-in compiler, and tools to produce standalone executable programs for DOS and, later, Windows. The system aimed to enable relatively rapid development and easy distribution of small to medium-sized applications.

The language features favored simplicity and accessibility. QuickBASIC supported structured programming with subroutines and functions, arrays and strings, and basic file I/O. It also included a set of graphics and sound commands suitable for games and educational programs. Programs could be compiled into executables, which improved performance and portability compared with interpreted code alone.

Within its era, QuickBASICs also referred to collections of example code, libraries, and sample projects that demonstrated graphics routines, data handling, and practical utilities. Sharing happened through magazines, user-run bulletin boards, and early online communities, contributing to a vibrant but compact software culture around DOS-era programming.

Today, QuickBASICs are discussed mainly in retro computing contexts. Although the original product has been superseded by modern languages, many programs remain accessible via emulators and DOSBox. The era influenced later BASIC dialects and left a lasting impression on hobbyist programming.