....I have an opportunity to be able to purchase a pcb milling/routing and drilling machine from someone that operates with Q-basic programming.....is Q-basic easy to learn?...does anyone have any ideas where I could get some information about it? I have been laying out all my pcb projects by hand or "paint shop" and "toner transfer" method, and if this machine will make it easier I want to go for it.....thanks, all!..........dr
....I have an opportunity to be able to purchase a pcb milling/routing and drilling machine from someone that operates with Q-basic programming.....is Q-basic easy to learn?...does anyone have any ideas where I could get some information about it? I have been laying out all my pcb projects by hand or "paint shop" and "toner transfer" method, and if this machine will make it easier I want to go for it.....thanks, all!..........dr
If the machine comes complete with the program to run it, you should be able to run it OK. But Qbasic is a DOS based programming system. It will run on the DOS 7 provided with Windows 98, and it will run on Windows XP. albeit with a reduced height window. But neither of these Windows systems can handle DOS's TSR programs which may be included in any Qbasic program. If there was a problem you could get around it by using a CD containing the DOS 5, 6 or 7 operating system and booting from that.
Qbasic is an easy sytem to program in - it's far easier than Basic. But note that Qbasic does not support USB, so it can be a problem with modern printers, but you can save to a file and print the file from Windows. Also Qbasic uses a FAT filing system and will not recognise a hard disk formatted for NTFS.
I think the last Qbasic version was QB 7.1. Microsoft are not marketting Qbasic any more, but neither have they released it for use as freeware. However, this and QB 4.5 (which I used) were(are?) available as free downloads from several sites and as far as I know Bill Gates has not complained.