BASIC computer language turns 40

The Salt Lake Tribune ^ | April 30, 2004 | J.M. Hirsch The Associated Press

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

On May 1, 1964, the BASIC computer programing language was born and for the first time computers were taken out of the lab and brought into the community.
    Forty years later pure BASIC -- Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code -- has all but disappeared, but its legacy lives on.
    "This is the birth of personal computing," said Arthur Luehrmann, a former Dartmouth physics professor who is writing a book about BASIC's development at the university. "It was personal computing before people knew what personal computing was."
    Paul Vick, a senior developer at Microsoft, said his company owes much to BASIC, the software giant's first product. Microsoft's Windows operating system and Office suite still use a descendent called Visual Basic.
    BASIC was born in an age when computers were large, expensive and the exclusive province of scientists, many of whom were forced to buy research time on the nation's handful of machines.
    Dartmouth math professors Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny envisioned something better, an unprecedented system that would give their entire school -- from the faculty to the food service staff -- simultaneous access to a computer.
    Using existing technology called time sharing, the pair created a primitive network to allow multiple users to share a single computer through terminals scattered around campus.
    With the help of students, Kurtz and Kemeny developed a commonsense language to run the system, relying on basic equations and commands, such as PRINT, LIST and SAVE.

John McGeachie, then a student, was there at 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, when BASIC came to life in the basement of Dartmouth's College Hall. Two terminals hooked up to a single computer ran two different programs.
    "I don't think anybody knew how it would end up catching on," said McGeachie, now 61 and a software designer. "It was just enormously exciting for us as students to be working on something so many people said couldn't be done."
    Within a short time nearly everyone at Dartmouth -- a humanities-based college -- had some BASIC experience. And it wasn't long before the business community took notice.
    Kurtz said that by 1970 nearly 100 companies used BASIC systems to share and sell time on computers. And when computers eventually entered the consumer market, most used BASIC.
    The popularity of BASIC waned as computers got more sophisticated, and newer languages were developed to take advantage of the power. Many of those languages, including the Internet's Java, have their roots in BASIC.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Memories !!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

IBM's 'dinosaur' turns 40

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

fyi

[Moose4]

10 PRINT "JOHN F. KERRY IS NOT FIT TO BE PRESIDENT"
20 GOTO 10

}:-)4

[martin_fierro]

Hee hee!

[pt17]

Memories !!

How true. In another life, back in the late 60s, I taught math. There was a local GE plant that let us hook into the GE/Dartmouth time-sharing network with ASR 35s, shown below, where my students did a lot of BASIC programming.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Those Teletype machines were tough to use, I much preferred the 026 card punch.

Of course , the computer was close by!

[Bear_in_RoseBear]

ping, for the memories...

[saquin]

Ah, the memories. I remember writing programs in BASIC on my old Commodore Vic 20 (hooked up to a 12-inch black and white TV, and a tape recorder to save programs).

[Rebelbase]

Mine was a Timex Sinclair 1000, BASIC, hooked to the same peripherals. It had a whopping 1K memory.

[Azzurri]

10 PRINT "JOHN F. KERRY IS NOT FIT TO BE PRESIDENT"
20 GOTO 10

LOL!

[South40]

[ChadGore]

1K SHOULD BE ENOUGH FOR EVERYBODY!

[JenB]

This is cool! I share a birthday with a really ancient programming language!

[South40]

"No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer."
-Bill Gates in the early 1970s

[festus]

That was my 2nd computer I ever used. The first is the commodore PET. It had black keys though.



I went to a small private religious school. The computer was so valuable they had a church member build a wooden box and put it in. When not in use the door was closed and the thing was locked with a small padlock.

[South40]

Happy Birthday!

[pt17]

I much preferred the 026 card punch.

LOL, the paper tape on an ASR was a little tougher to fix than a punch card. On the other hand, dropping a roll of paper tape wasn't nearly as bad as dropping a tray of cards, was it? Used the 026 quite a bit, along with an 082, 083, 416, 407 and 650. I'd list more but this is getting too maudlin and making me feel old.

[pt17]

Was that Commodore before or after the Osborn?

[Ronly Bonly Jones]

10 PRINT "BASIC SUCKS!!!!!!!";
20 GOTO 10
30 END

(I learned a form of Basic so primitive it actually used the "LET" statement.)