10 FOR X=1 to 1000000
20 PRINT "JOHN F. KERRY IS NOT FIT TO BE PRESIDENT"
30 REM *** NEXT LINE=BELL
30 PRINT "^G"
30 NEXT X
40 PRINT "END OF RUN, NO MORE ATTEMPTS!!"
50 END
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.
Paul Allen wrote his BASIC interpreter for the first personal computer, the Altair, without having access to one. When he loaded it from paper tape, it worked flawlessly on the first try, as did his paper tape loading program!
Yes the good old days. I remember a final project that required me to write a language translator. I couldn't get the %$#&* thing to work. Finally, around 3 AM, after staring at the printout for hours it hit me. Two of the punch cards were reversed in order. I think I laughed and cried at the same time.
I told this story to my kids and they gave me a blank look. As far as they're concerned I might as well have been talking about riding a horse and buggy!
OK, class, today's life-lesson is: "Always keep a Flair handy so you can draw a diagonal line across the top of your card deck"!
Me, too :) Later we "upgraded" to the Vic-20 and Commodore 64, the latter of which my brother still has and toys with sometimes :)
Strangely enough, I became an accomplished Z80 assembler programmer because I was frustrated by my TRS-80's lame BASIC only allowed two-character variable names, while the assembler let you use a whopping 6 characters. I actually found it easier to write programs in assembler for most uses than in MS BASIC.
Once I disassembled the TRS-80 BASIC ROM and tried to follow its logic to see how it was written. Man, what a tangled pile of spaghetti that code was! Now, Gates & Allen DID accomplish something impressive in fitting a BASIC interpreter into 4K (later 8K) of ROM memory, but still - uuuuuugleeeeeee!!!!
Ahh, the good old days -- programming in BAL was for real men -- even the women who did so were real men!
16 fixed point registers and almost all of them spoken for. I had to write a stacking macro simulator (I think that was on the 370) since I kept running our of registers.
I used to love those old cards and didn't want to give them up, and when rumors began circulating that a keyboard and monitor were someday going to replace the whole punch card process (punch your cards, give 'em to the guy at the counter, come back in a couple of hours to pick up your printout and find out whether your program had bombed or not), I just couldn't figure out what the heck the monitor was for, lol!
10 FOR X=1 to 1000000
20 PRINT "JOHN F. KERRY IS NOT FIT TO BE PRESIDENT"
30 REM *** NEXT LINE=BELL
30 PRINT "^G"
30 NEXT X
40 PRINT "END OF RUN, NO MORE ATTEMPTS!!"
50 END
I ported the MS Basic interpreter to a proprietary 8085 based OS back in 1980.
The coding was pretty bad, and except for obvious inefficiencies that I came across implementing the I/O
drivers, I left well enough alone.
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