32-bit GW Basic? I thought that was a really old DOS program dating back to the PC 5150, in other words a 16-bit application. Whatever the case may be, I doubt it'll work on Windows 8.1

No, it is 32-bit. Ran off the Cmd prompt on XP and off the Virtual XP program on Windows 7.

NTVDM handles that, doesn't mean it's a 32-bit program. If it were a true 32-bit program you would have no issue running it in 64-bit

We had GW-Basic on an old 286 laptop. Later versions of 16-bit MSDOS came with QBasic. I did a web search and didn't find anything about a 32-bit version of GWBASIC. I think it just ran because of the backward compatibility which was retained in 32-bit Windows versions.
Unfortunately Microsoft decided not to support 16-bit apps on their 64-bit editions of WIndows. I don't know if DOSBox will run it, but it seems that it should.

You raise an interesting issue. I don't know if there is any traditional BASIC ("Visual" BASIC doesn't count) that will run under 64-bit Windows.
If not then that's really unfortunate, because BASIC was the gateway for tons of people who got into programming. I still don't know of any better programming language for beginners to learn from. It's also just plain practical for writing small programs. It used to be part of the preinstalled apps with DOS, ready for anybody to use. It was educational, dammit.

shamino wrote:

You raise an interesting issue. I don't know if there is any traditional BASIC ("Visual" BASIC doesn't count) that will run under 64-bit Windows.

QB64 is QuickBasic v4.5-compatible (if that counts) and seems to have a bit of an active community.

There may not be. On recheck, I'm not sure my basix.exe & programs thereunder are 32-bit. May be 16-bit. Originally written before Windows, but updated and edited under XP. .
But, I can't locate NTVDM.exe on searching my 64-bit 8.1. Or anything else that looks helpful.
Shamino is right on GW-Basic. Over the years I wrote personal programs and a damn good baseball game (for use with APBA player cards) with color, action graphics and music (later unsupported).

There's not a 64-bit Windows OS in the world that can run 16-bit programs. XP 64-bit won't run GW-Basic either (nor Baisca or QBasic). They took out the 16-bit subsystem. The only 64-bit Windows OS that (possibly) could is Windows 7 Ultimate for its Virtual XP mode

As has been suggested, you should look at QB64 or FreeBASIC. You are not the first person who has wanted to run GW-BASIC/Basica/QBasic applications under modern versions of Windows; those solutions should be adequate for your needs.

shamino wrote:

If not then that's really unfortunate, because BASIC was the gateway for tons of people who got into programming. I still don't know of any better programming language for beginners to learn from. It's also just plain practical for writing small programs. It used to be part of the preinstalled apps with DOS, ready for anybody to use. It was educational, dammit.

There has been no shortage of ink spilled over the years regarding how terrible BASIC is for pretty much everything. Python is probably a perfectly reasonable alternative these days, though there are even more choices if you're just looking for something to teach programming, like Scratch or Alice.

A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which for many years was the leading cause of brain damage in proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective that “It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” This is another case (like Pascal) of the cascading lossage that happens when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer (a) is very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros in the 1980s. As it is, it probably ruined tens of thousands of potential wizards.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/BASIC.html

We kind of went off on a tangent about 32/64-bit BASICs, but the original question posed was

juggy wrote:

Will Dosbox run my old basic programs?

...and that's a yes - GWBASIC works just fine from within DOSBox.

Jorpho wrote:

There has been no shortage of ink spilled over the years regarding how terrible BASIC is for pretty much everything.

I'm sure, but I've never really agreed with the extent of the criticism. BASIC kept things simple, and that's very valuable for it's intended audience and casual usage. Just look at the results - in the heyday of BASIC, most computer users were a programmer on some level. Today, few people can program anything.
I've never looked at Python, but I probably should. I've fallen out of touch with the latest languages.

The gripe I remember hearing the most about BASIC was the existence of GOTO commands. I don't see that as a flaw. Native assembly is built with JMP instructions and their conditional equivalents. BASIC has other loop structures as well, and anybody who spends much time with it will learn them. Of course, any newbie programmer will write spaghetti code at some point, but that's just part of the learning process.

I guess it's safe to say I strongly disagree with that article about BASIC causing brain damage to anyone. I found that my experience with BASIC on a 1980s micro made me a much more prepared student than many of my college classmates seemed to be. When I'd get involved in a group project, even in later classes, I was often surprised at how some of them struggled with writing code.
In the first semester, my only challenge was learning the C language and to become more disciplined in program structure. This wasn't a big deal and it went smoothly. Most of the students, who I assume were untainted by BASIC, were having much more difficulty.

shamino wrote:

BASIC kept things simple, and that's very valuable for it's intended audience and casual usage. Just look at the results - in the heyday of BASIC, most computer users were a programmer on some level. Today, few people can program anything.

There's probably an interesting variety of reasons for that change, but I'd say foremost among them is simply that GUIs and other advancements in interface design have just made computing so much more accessible. I might further surmise that's how you wound up with so many fellow students who struggled with C. But we're probably getting off topic.

PC-BASIC should work

PC-BASIC 3.23 is an interpreter for GW-BASIC files. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and other Unix-based systems and targets full compatibility with GW-BASIC version 3.23.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pcbasic/
Last Update: 2014-04-20

I love C 😀

could care less about C++ though

new 'easy high-level' languages like Java, Ruby, Python, .net C# etc. i'm not too thrilled about. The overhead is nasty

DISCLAIMER: Former BASIC 'programmer' *cough*was one of those kids that retyped numbered lines from 'make games!!!' books*cough*