Comment by usrusr

MS DOS used to come with a Basic interpreter, if that's what you mean ;)

Later, when the PC platform became what we know today, there wasn't really a channel for free (small f) software except shareware magazines and Microsoft surely would not be seen with that crowd! In those days, Microsoft wasn't concerned with losing the heads and minds to another platform but with losing the revenue to Borland. Since then, more and more has been made available (I still fondly remember laying my hands on the first Windows SDK day came with a free command line version of the MSVC compiler), but it is a culture shift that won't be rushed as long as there are no really pressing reasons.