READY.
Microsoft BASIC for the MOS 6502 — and why it mattered.
When you switched on a Commodore, an Apple II, or an Atari, the first word most machines showed you was the same. That single prompt — and the interpreter behind it — shaped how millions of people met the computer.
One interpreter, many machines
Microsoft licensed a single 6502 BASIC to a dozen manufacturers. The exhibit traces each dialect back to a shared ancestor.
Inside 8 kilobytes
Floating-point math, tokenized keywords, and a full editor — squeezed into less memory than this sentence occupies on disk today.
The prompt as a teacher
Why dropping users straight into a programmable prompt turned buyers into authors — and seeded a generation of programmers.
PETSCII.org
A companion reference to Commodore’s built-in character set, cross-linked from this exhibit.
Visit PETSCII.orgDr. Lena Ostrowski, Curator of Languages, with conservation by the RSF technical team. Hardware photography from the Foundation collection, Seattle.