[4] Eubanks developed CBASIC in his spare time while he was still a naval officer stationed on the submarine USS George Washington at Vallejo, California.

BASIC-E and early versions of CBASIC compiled source code into an intermediate p-code file, which was then executed by a separate run-time interpreter program.

CBASIC proved very popular because it incorporated 14-digit binary-coded decimal (BCD) math which eliminated MBASIC's rounding errors that were sometimes troublesome for accounting.

The magazine stated that the language had become popular "despite serious drawbacks", including the required preprocessor for interpreted source code making debugging difficult, slow speed, and incompatible changes.

[5] In September 1982 Pournelle said that CB80 "remains a real competitor to Pascal and PL/I [with] few of the inherent defects of BASIC", citing its local variables and Pascal-like functions, and approved of its new, freer licensing.