At my first job, our entire order-entry and inventory management system was written in QBASIC. I wish I had the source to try it out with this.

I know someone who might, if we could figure out how to get it off a DOS 5.25" floppy!

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ColdStream 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	VorpalWay an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The best (and most flexible) way to get data of old floppies is https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle which reads the data at a raw magnetic level using a standard floppy drive and a custom open source circuit board which replaces the host controller. However, if you are specifically dealing with PC floppies, it is potentially overkill (but it might still be the easiest way to hook up a 5.25" floppy drive to a modern computer). 5.25" drives may also need a separate power supply in addition to the greaseweazle, for 3.5" drives the GW has enough power to power the drive directly though.

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vunderba 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.