The good news is that 5.25" floppies have tended to be more resilient to time than the 3.5" discs. Turns out just having less data spread over a larger space helped them in this regard.

Hardest part is usually trying to find working drives and a means of getting the data off the system.

That’s awesome. If you ever end up getting a copy of it, I’d love to stress-test QBasic-Core against it since I built in a virtual hard drive to allow File I/O (PUT for random access, PRINT to file number, etc.)

I’ve got a fairly large collection of several hundred programs from the early to late ’90s that I’ve been carefully testing A/B testing against period accurate hardware and my simulator but actual professionally used QBASIC-based applications from back with the source intact are hard to come by.

Loved Visual Basic! VB3 was probably my first experience as a kid to the idea of “threading” and UI-blocking operations.

Remember this?

  DoEvents

Yes, electrostatic speakers are a good example. Also a lot of PC motherboards I've had over the years have had the little piezoelectric speaker. And while still magnetic, there are planar magnetic speakers which are much more like electrostatic speakers (just using a magnetic field instead of electric field) than the typical moving coil / dynamic speaker drivers that you think of.

You absolutely should!

I’ve already sunk hundreds of hours into building out the fidelity of QuickBASIC (everything down to emulating memory access so you can simulate realistic PEEKing and POKEing), so I don’t have the sanity points left to tackle any other variants myself, but I’d love to see a GW-BASIC version.