Many present-day hams can remember the early days of personal computers, before they became fixtures in almost every shack. The Personal Computer era began in 1981, when IBM introduced their 4.77-MHz, 8088-based PC, with its two 51/4-inch 360-kilobyte floppy drives. This primitive machine worked under a primitive Disk Operating System (DOS) supplied by an unknown company called Microsoft.
Back then, almost everyone experimenting with computers was familiar with the BASIC programming language, an acronym for "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code." In fact, one of Microsoft's claim-to-fame was their work in the BASIC language.
Nowadays, almost 20 years later, we hardly wonder at 500-MHz, Pentium-based computers, with 20 Gigabyte hard disks and easy-to-use GUI operating systems such as Windows 98. Indeed, computer pundits have mused that the sum total of knowledge in the computer field doubles every year. And, of course, the computer you bought last month is superseded by another more-powerful model this month, at a lower price too!
The BASIC language itself has evolved a lot over the last 35 years since it originated at Dartmouth University in 1965. The latest version from Microsoft is Visual Basic 6. However, there are still thousands of "legacy" interpreted-BASIC programs written years before the advent of Windows 98. And many such programs are very useful still.
At ARRL HQ we receive questions from some hams who don't know how to use the BASIC programs that are available for some of our older books. Part of the problem is that the QBASIC.EXE software needed to run BASIC programs has disappeared from sight in computers using Windows 95 or Windows 98 operating systems. Actually, the software is available - it's just not automatically installed as it once used to be in earlier versions of Windows.
QBASIC.EXE and its help file QBASIC.HLP are located on the CD-ROM that came for Windows 95 or Windows 98. You can locate these files using the "Find" command [Ctrl][F] from the Windows Explorer. (Specifically, they are located in the \tools\oldmsdos\ directory.) Once you find them, copy the files to your C:\Windows\Command folder.
Once you install QBASIC.EXE and started it running, select File, Open and then choose the BASIC file you want to run. Then Run, Start to actually run the program.