Editing Tiny BASIC (section)

===Tiny BASIC===
The complaint was not well received. Among the many responses, Bob Albrecht, another Homebrew member and founder of the [[People's Computer Company]] (PCC), felt the best response would be to produce their own BASIC that was completely free to use by anyone. He approached [[Dennis Allison]], a member of the Computer Science faculty at [[Stanford University]], to write a specification for a version of BASIC that would fit in 2 to 3 kilobytes of memory.{{efn|At the time, the most common memory size for the 8080 was 4&nbsp;KB, which cost hundreds of dollars.}} To aid [[porting]], the design was based on an [[Intermediate representation#Intermediate language|intermediate language]] (IL), an interpreter for the interpreter, which meant only a small portion of the total code had to be ported.

Allison's initial design was published in the September 1975 edition of the PCC newsletter, along with an [[Intel 8080]] version of the IL interpreter. The article called on programmers to implement the design on their computer and send the resulting [[assembly language]] version back to the PCC. They stated their plans to publish three special newsletters containing these user-submitted versions, along with bug fixes, programs written in the new BASIC, and suggestions and enhancements. The concept gained further notice when it was republished in the January 1976 edition of the [[Association for Computing Machinery|ACM]] Special Interest Group on Programming Languages.<ref name="Allison 1976">{{Cite journal|last=Allison |first=Dennis |title=Design notes for TINY BASIC |journal=SIGPLAN Notices |volume=11 |issue=7 |pages=25–33 |publisher=ACM |date=July 1976 |doi=10.1145/987491.987494 |s2cid=18819472 |doi-access=free }}</ref> Submissions poured in. Among the notable early versions was Tiny BASIC Extended by Dick Whipple and John Arnold which ran in 3K of RAM, added [[For loop|FOR...NXT]] loops, and allowed a single numeric array. They avoided the use of the IL and wrote it directly in machine code, using [[octal]].<ref name="TB Code Sheet"/>

The first of the three planned newsletters, with the title "Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia, Running Light Without Overbyte", was published in January 1976.<ref name="TB Code Sheet">{{Cite journal |journal=[[Dr. Dobb's Journal|Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia, Running Light Without Overbyte]] |title=TB Code Sheet |volume=1 |issue=1 |date=December 1975 |url=https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal_vol_01/page/n1/mode/2up}}</ref> It starts with a note from Albrecht, under the penname "the dragon", suggesting that three editions would not be enough, and asked the readers if they would like to see it continue. It also reprinted the original article on Tiny BASIC from PCC, included the complete listing of Extended TB, and included a number of small BASIC programs including tips-and-tricks from Allison.{{sfn|Dobbs|1976|p=5}} Response to the first issue was so impressive that the introduction to the second issue stated they had already decided to continue publishing the new newsletter under the simplified name ''Dr. Dobb's Journal''. Over the next several issues, additional versions of the language were published, and similar articles began appearing in other magazines like ''[[Interface Age]]''.