Integer variables, print, dim, fre(0)

Booted. Eleven gigabytes free, and a poem on top of it.

I've been building a BASIC interpreter. Not a port, not an emulator wrapped around someone else's ROM. A real one, written from nothing, that boots on 64-bit hardware, clears the screen, and greets you with a blinking cursor and the word Ready.

It's a strange thing to make in 2026. Let me tell you why I made it anyway.

The ceiling, torn off

Every 8-bit machine I ever loved booted up bragging about how little it had. 38911 bytes free. 60300 bytes free. You typed one modest array into that and the machine started sweating. And people wrote whole worlds inside those numbers.

I wanted the language of those machines. The immediacy of it, the way you turn it on and it's just there, waiting, no project files, no build step, no ceremony between you and the idea.  But with the ceiling gone. The same quiet prompt. None of the walls.

So the banner reads:

I make myself rich by making my wants few. - Henry David Thoreau

...printed directly above 11,270,053,888 bytes free. I know. I put the man who wanted less over more memory than the machines it honours could have dreamed of. The irony is the point. It's the whole project in two lines.

What works now

print, simple arithmetic with integers (16, 32 and 64 bit), dim, fre(0), gramaxx, gramaxy.

What's next

float, double, line numbers, list, run, graphics.