PowerBASIC is a variant of the BASIC programming language. Its syntax is very close to GW Basic, QBasic, and Turbo Basic. It compiles to native code on PCs (DOS and Win32). The executable files it creates are compact, run fast, and require no runtime dependencies. PowerBASIC compilers are made by PowerBASIC Inc. and are the successor of Turbo BASIC (MSDOS) which was published by Borland International, itself a successor of BASIC/Z (CP/M, MDOS).
PowerBASIC compilers are a popular alternative to Visual Basic, yet actually compare well with C programming language compilers in terms of power. PowerBASIC can create and use DLLs. Unlike Visual Basic's large and mandatory overhead, it is common for a sophisticated application written in PowerBASIC to be small enough to fit on a single floppy disk.
Programminglanguages of the era tended to be designed, like the machines on which they ran, for specific purposes such as scientific formula processing.
The original BASIC language was invented in 1963 by John Kemeny (1926–1993) and Thomas Kurtz (1928–) at Dartmouth College and implemented by a team of Dartmouth students under their direction.
Notwithstanding the language's use on several minicomputers, it was the introduction of the Altair 8800 microcomputer in 1975 that truly spread BASIC.
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