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The first widely documented BASIC on the Data General Nova platform appears to be Data General Extended BASIC. I can date it to at least 1978 due to copyrights in the manual, but I suspect it was released years before that. Bob Leedom had to have something when he ported Star Trek circa 1974. Does anyone have a reasonable release date for Extended 1.x?

Beyond Extended, were there other dialects from earlier times? The only other BASIC I get hits on for DG is Data General Business BASIC, but that's later, and I believe only ran on their larger platforms?

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    I've only used Business BASIC. No floats - all integers but you could print them with dots in between to make up the currency. Problem is we used it in engineering. It was OK for costing stuff up and lookup databases but useless for anything else that needed floating point.
    – cup
    Jul 6, 2020 at 13:28
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    This article gives a year, but I haven't looked up from where they got it en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General_Extended_BASIC
    – UncleBod
    Jul 6, 2020 at 14:18
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    Link to an older manual. This has copyright 1971-1975. archive.org/details/…
    – UncleBod
    Jul 6, 2020 at 14:26
  • Most excellent Bod!
    – Maury Markowitz
    Jul 6, 2020 at 15:30
  • Business Basic didn't need a large platform - it ran on 32K Novas. These came with a keyboard which had plastic keys and a metal frame. Since polyester clothing was quite common in those days, getting zaps from the keyboard frame in those days was quite common.
    – cup
    Jan 30, 2021 at 10:11

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I used a DG Nova at Agriculture Canada from 1973 to about 1977, when a DG Eclipse was put in. My "Compact numerical methods for computers" book was written using this, and appeared in February 1979 and is still in print (2nd Edition 1990). Recently started work on cleaning up codes and making sure they still run (some are embedded in e.g., R). https://github.com/pcolsen/Nash-Compact-Numerical-Methods

I found this while looking to see if I could find out more about DG BASIC and how it was set up .

JN profjcnash at gmail.com

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