B32 Business Basic was a competitor to

Data General Business Basic Data General Business Basic was a BASIC interpreter (based on a version from MAI Basic Four) marketed by Data General for their Nova minicomputer in the 1970s, and later ported to the Data General Eclipse MV and AViiON computers. Most busines ...

written by

Murray Haszard Murray Hayden Haszard (born 11 May 1954) is a New Zealand entrepreneur and businessman who founded the companies B32 Software and Binary Research and is the chairman of Ilion Technology. B32 Software In 1983 he was contracted to convert Kiwi P ...

in 1986. It ran on the

Data General Data General Corporation was one of the first minicomputer firms of the late 1960s. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Their first product, 1969's Data General Nova, was a 16-bit minicompute ...

Eclipse MV line of computers initially, and was ported to

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

in 1989 and to

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

in 1991. B32 Software was the company that developed and supported B32 Business Basic, with the original site in

Auckland Auckland (pronounced ) ( mi, Tāmaki Makaurau) is a large metropolitan city in the North Island of New Zealand. The most populous urban area in the country and the fifth largest city in Oceania, Auckland has an urban population of about ...

, New Zealand supplemented by a sales and support centre in

Blue Ash, Ohio Blue Ash is a city in Hamilton County, Ohio. An inner suburb of Cincinnati, the population was 12,114 at the time of the 2010 census. History The area that is now Blue Ash was settled around 1791. In 1797, the first settlers built Carpenter's ...

. The B32 interpreter was highly compatible with Data General Business Basic (DGBB), but it also enhanced and extended that language in many ways. Like DGBB, B32 could access Data General's INFOS II database and it could use DGBB's lock server or its own improved version. B32 was over twice as fast for number crunching, string manipulation, and disk I/O. Many of the internal restrictions of DGBB were removed. B32 allowed 32,767 line numbers (65,535 in later versions), compared with DGBB's 9,999. B32 allowed more memory for programs, more simultaneous locks, and more files to be open at once. Language enhancements included a high-speed internal sort routine, do-while blocks, and the ability to step backwards through an

indexed file An indexed file is a computer file with an index that allows easy random access to any record given its file key. The key must be such that it uniquely identifies a record. If more than one index is present the other ones are called ''alternate ...

. Debugging facilities were also significantly improved over DGBB. B32 allowed programs to run with full cursor positioning and attribute support on non-Data General terminals, even programs which had Data General control sequences hard-coded into them. B32 carried out all arithmetic at "quad precision", i.e.

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit CPUs and ALUs are those that are based on processor registers, address buses, or data buses of that size. A compu ...

, and emulated the "triple precision" and "double precision" versions of DGBB at runtime. This avoided the subtle incompatibilities between the two versions of DGBB. On Unix and DOS, B32 emulated all commonly used system calls of Data General's AOS/VS and RDOS operating systems, including implementing its own symbolic links on SCO

Xenix Xenix is a discontinued version of the Unix operating system for various microcomputer platforms, licensed by Microsoft from AT&T Corporation in the late 1970s. The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) later acquired exclusive rights to the software, and ...

and DOS. In 1991, a features war between B32 and one of its competitors, Transoft's Universal Business Basic, saw major improvements to the B32 language. B32 added a Bluebird Business Basic emulation mode, made line numbers optional, and added subroutine calls by name with parameter passing. Transoft had greater financial resources than B32, and more effective marketing. It purchased B32 in 1992. The DOS and Unix versions of B32 were discarded as Universal Business Basic ran on those operating systems, but the Eclipse MV version of B32 continued to be sold while the MV line lasted. Some of the B32 Software staff in Blue Ash moved to Transoft's

Atlanta, Georgia Atlanta ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the seat of Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia, but its territory falls in both Fulton and DeKalb counties. With a population of 498,7 ...

office. The New Zealand staff went on to found Binary Research.

References

DG Review article on the acquisition of B32 by Transoft
{{BASIC Data General BASIC interpreters