Rocky Mountain BASIC

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This article is about the BASIC dialect created at HP, but now transferred to Agilent. For the dialect created at DEC but now transferred to HP, see HP BASIC for OpenVMS.

Rocky Mountain BASIC (also RMB or RM-BASIC) is a dialect of the BASIC programming language created by HP. It was especially popular for control of automatic test equipment using GPIB. It has several features which are or were unusual in BASIC dialects, such as event-driven operation, extensive external I/O support, complex number support, and matrix manipulation functions. Today, RMB is mainly used in environments where an existing investment in RMB software, hardware, or expertise already exists. Completely new efforts are more likely to use more "modern" BASIC dialects (such as Visual Basic), or eschew BASIC entirely in favor of some other high-level language (such as C++).

[edit] History and implementations

The origins of RMB can be traced back to HP's Colorado facilities. Since Colorado is located in the Rocky Mountains, this variation of BASIC was dubbed "Rocky Mountain BASIC", to differentiate it from the many other BASIC dialects. As of this writing, it is unclear if the RMB name was original to HP or came from outside, but HP/Agilent now use the term in their own documentation, as well as the more formal "HP BASIC" product name.

Early models of what became the HP 9000 series of computers were used as controllers for HP automatic test equipment, connected via the HP Instrument Bus. HP needed to provide a programming language which would be friendly to the engineers and scientists which used such test equipment. The BASIC programming language, already intended to be easy for novices, was chosen. Early implementations of RMB software on the HP 9000 platform were called HP BASIC/WS. BASIC/WS ran stand-alone. It provided operating system (OS), integrated development environment (editor and debugger), and the language interpreter. Later, HP implemented RMB on top of the HP-UX OS, and called it BASIC/UX.

As technology advanced, HP was able to embed RMB implementations directly in the test equipment. The capabilities of these embedded implementations varied. These implementations went by a variety of names, including HP Instrument BASIC and Board Test BASIC (BT-BASIC).

HP produced an RMB implementation for Microsoft Windows called HP Instrument BASIC for Windows; however, it never enjoyed the success of their other RMB products.

Another company, TransEra, created a clone implementation of RMB, which they called High Tech BASIC, or HT BASIC (now HTBasic). HP later licensed HT BASIC from TransEra Corporation of Orem, Utah, re-branded it, and sold it as HP BASIC for Windows (no relation to the HP-produced "HP Instrument BASIC for Windows").

When HP spun-off their instrument division as Agilent Technologies, the RMB products went with Agilent. Agilent later discontinued all RMB products, although promises to make support available until at least 2006. They now refer people to the TransEra product. As of 2006, TransEra is still maintaining and updating HTBasic with fixes and new features.

Although HTBasic is fundamentally an interpreted language, a compiler is available.

Another company, TAMS, Inc., licensed the BASIC/UX source code, ported it to Linux, and now sells it as TAMS BASIC for Linux.

[edit] References

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