The first draft was released for comments in January 1976 and the final standard, known alternately as ANSI X3.60-1978 or ECMA-55, was published in December 1977.
General Electric, who supplied the GE-225 computer it ran on, marketed a slight variation to commercial users and saw immediate uptake.
Intended to be used in laboratories and factory settings, the company was surprised to find most were being sold for business processing.
The system worked in a fashion similar to the Dartmouth model, using one machine to control input/output and another to run the programs.
Other vendors quickly copied the HP dialect, notably Data General for their Nova series which were very successful in the early 1970s.
One holdout was Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), who had been involved with the JOSS program at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and introduced their FOCAL language based on it.
[10] Where differences between implementations existed, like in the handling of the FOR statements or whether or not spaces were required between keywords and values, the standard always selected the Dartmouth pattern.
These more advanced features would be a focus of the follow-up effort, Full BASIC, which began serious work after the publication of Minimal.
Which dialect any particular interpreter followed was generally based on the machines used to develop it; MS BASIC was developed on a PDP-10[12] and has many features from DEC's BASIC-PLUS, while Apple BASIC was written by Steve Wozniak based on an HP manual and uses HP's system of string handling.
Numerous comments were used to update the draft and its final release was prepared in June 1977 and formally ratified by the ECMA on 14 December 1977.
[15] As there were no microcomputer vendors in the standards groups, the system mostly found use on mainframe versions, which invariably had many extensions.
The effort proceeded so slowly that the Dartmouth participants left and released their own version of the still-emerging standard as True Basic in 1984.
This was bug-ridden and confusing, leading Jerry Pournelle to deride it as "madness"[17] and John Dvorak to dismiss it as "sad" and "doomed to failure.
[21] Keywords include REM, DIM, OPTION, DEF ,LET, PRINT, INPUT, READ, DATA, RESTORE, IF...THEN, FOR...TO...STEP...NEXT, GO TO, GO SUB...RETURN, ON...GO TO, RANDOMIZE, STOP and END.
[28] There are 11 defined functions; ABS, ATN, COS, EXP, INT, LOG, RND, SGN, SIN, SQR and TAN.