How can I exit Microsoft GW-BASIC, IBM BASICA, or other similar old dialects of BASIC?

Question

Microsoft BASIC, GW-BASIC and BASICA all use a prompt that looks like this:

I can\'t figure out how to exit any of these. Typing END does not e

Answer 1

According to the manual linked by paulsm4, CTRL-BREAK while output is being redirected will exit BASIC. It also says the SHELL command returns to the MS-DOS command shell. (On the original IBM PC, the BASIC was in ROM, and therefore always resident in memory.)

Answer 2

Type "system" and hit enter to exit GW-BASIC in DOS.

Type "shell" and hit enter to go to DOS but still have GW-BASIC in memory. Type "exit" while in DOS to return to GW-BASIC.

Answer 3

Usually for those command line editors Ctl-Z would do the trick since it sends the EOF character and thus signal terminating input.

If that doesn't do it, try typing system

Answer 4

GWBASIC and its clones (e.g., IBM's BASIC and BASICA) exited to the DOS prompt with the command system.

Although redirection was possible even in early versions of MS-DOS/PC-DOS, the BASIC interpreter bypassed using the standard input and output streams, and had its own Ctrl-Break/Ctrl-C handler, so neither of those keystrokes would terminate the interpreter.
The shell command started a fresh copy of the system command interpreter (usually COMMAND.COM), or executed a system command and then returned to BASIC, but did not remove the interpreter from memory.