Comments on: FOSBIC1 compiler https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/07/11/fosbic1-compiler/ Fun with Virtualization Tue, 11 Jul 2023 23:01:05 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0.1 By: Michael Engel https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/07/11/fosbic1-compiler/comment-page-1/#comment-333730 Tue, 11 Jul 2023 23:01:05 +0000 http://virtuallyfun.com/?p=12964#comment-333730 Interesting, I never heard of this even though I was a PhD student in Marburg, about 30 km north of Gießen (but, of course, decades after that BASIC compiler was written).

Amazingly, this work was done in the economics department – Gießen didn’t have a CS department back then and still today only has two professors working in CS. There’s a German newspaper article on FOSBIC praising the research results at https://www.uni-giessen.de/de/fbz/svc/hrz/org/historie/Dokumente/FOSBIC.pdf

Weber is not mentioned as emeritus professor at the economics department of the university of Gießen, so he might have left Gießen before retiring. According to https://www.jstor.org/stable/24179027 Weber was 61 years old in 1988, so he would be around 96 years old today if he is still alive.

The other person mentioned in the readme is “DIPL.-ING.,DIPL.-OEC.C.W.TUERSCHMANN”. It seems this is Carl Wolfram Türschmann (the name is pretty rare in Germany, you can also find a LinkedIn profile “Wolfram Türschmann” that mentions Gießen uni, so I assume this is him) who also published a textbook on BASIC with Karl Weber (https://doc1.bibliothek.li/abc/A042761.pdf).

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