Posted on 05/01/2004 10:22:14 AM PDT by 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.
Mine was a home built S-100 using an 8-bit 8080 processor interfaced to an ASR-33 Teletype for a terminal.
That is WAY cool! :-)
VB pretty much fills that need.
I still use the latest and greatest of MS's 16 bit BASIC, BASIC 7.1 PDS, for data crunching. On a 200 mhz Pentium it screams through tedious tasks with dramatic speed. I spend zero time on user interface for many of these tasks - all processing power is devoted to the data handling. The screen simply reverts to whatever was on it prior to launching the editor until the program finishes. Then it says "Press any key to continue..."
PDS 7.1 takes advantage of expanded memory (remember that?) for array and string handling, has a neat database file engine called ISAM handling files up to 132 megabytes (remember when most hard drives weren't that big?) and can easily interface with C or assembler subroutines (functions).
At least two guys wrote some really cool add-on functions for the system, one in all assembler, one with some in assembler and some BASIC.
The original Sinclair sold in the UK only had 1k.
20 PRINT "FLIP"
30 PRINT "FLOP"
40 GOTO 20
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