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]

Happy Birthday!

[Ronly Bonly Jones]

Paul Vick, a senior developer at Microsoft, said his company owes much to BASIC>>>

Yes, starting with most Windows source code.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I feel old cause I am, takes me a couple of hours in the morning to get going. I taught math in the early 60's as a grad teaching assistant working on advanced degrees.

[South40]

The Osborn was the early '80s. The Commadore 64 was intorduced in 1986 (I think).

[Texas_Jarhead]

lol!

[jimfree]

Great memories, in fact. Prior to there being significant inexpensive software to license for a home computer I wrote a check book balancing program in BASICA. My wife played with it a bit and that helped her later as she wrote SAS programs in grad school. I never had to use it on the job though. Maybe that's why my memories are fond.

[Willie Green]

Memories !!

Gee, I didn't realize that BASIC was THAT old.
My introduction to programming languages began in '71 with keypunching FORTRAN IV (w/ WATFOR AND WATFIV), COBOL and IBM 370 Assembly Language. I didn't stumble across BASIC until '75 or '76, and remember thinking it was nothing but an anemic (albeit easier), watered down version of FORTRAN.

[martin_fierro]

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

A buddy of mine was taking a programming class in the early 80s. He used to bring over the audio cassettes and we'd play them on the stereo. wEiRd sOuNdS! <|:)~

[mikegi]

Yes, starting with most Windows source code.

Oh really?!? Windows is written in BASIC?

[fjsva]

I still have my first "laptop" sitting on my bookshelf. A Timex Sinclair 2068. Of course you needed a TV set for the monitor and a cassette player for memory. Still it was sort of portable.....

[mikegi]

I still have my first "laptop" sitting on my bookshelf. A Timex Sinclair 2068. Of course you needed a TV set for the monitor and a cassette player for memory. Still it was sort of portable.....

Well, all together that would weigh about as much as one of the original Compaq "luggables". After I'd haul one of those things around airports all day I'd swear one arm was an inch longer than the other.

[Ronly Bonly Jones]

It would explain much. If true. ;0)

[Conan the Librarian]

I have one of those!!!!! It still works too.

If only I could remember all those Commode r commands.

[Fedora]

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

That is cool! And what's even cooler is it's one of the few programming languages I actually know! I have some old D&D rpg games written in BASIC lying around here somewhere, was thinking of typing them in to play them a while back :)

[South40]

If only I could remember all those Commode r commands.

Check this

[kdot]

I'm afraid we dinosaurs will be extincted soon. Kids today don't know or appreciate real programming. Interview one and ask: "What programming languages do you know?" If you get the answer "All of them", you've found your candidate. Programming is an art. Just because someone takes a VB class in school and can operate any one of our great point and click 4GL development environments (Visual C++, Delphi, etc.) doesn't make him a programmer. Let's talk technical. (from an old Digital perspective).

• Can you write a Macro program and access a few run time library routines for me?
• Whats the difference between QIO and QIOW?
• What is a context switch?
• What does CMKRNL do?
• What is a distributed lock manager?
• How do you maintain a process context when a node in a cluster fails?
• Do you know the difference between parallel and vector processing?
• What parameters would you adjust if you witnessed process swapping (keep it clean!)
• And the finali - how many more years until YOU retire?

I don't have anyone to talk dirty with anymore. boo hoo.

[The Great RJ]

Makes me feel old having my first computer experience writing programs in a BASIC predecessor, FORTRAN, entering my programs and data on punch cards

[supercat]

The original version of BASIC may have been designed 40 years ago, but how many people (even among those who program some variant of BASIC) know Dartmouth BASIC?

When did the first variants appear that regarded strings as a natural type (rather than an array) and allowed for multiple statements on a line (including following an IF/THEN)?

On a related note, did Darmouth basic start out supporting the "MAT" keyword, or was that a later enhancement?

[jalisco555]

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?

I remember pulling an all-nighter at the computer center when some poor guy dropped a shoebox full of punch cards. They scattered everywhere. The guy was almost in tears and the rest of us truly felt his pain.

[roadcat]

Memories !!

I was a late-comer. Didn't start using BASIC until 1970 on a college computer. A couple years later I really appreciated the simplicity of BASIC when I started doing Octal machine language programming on a PDP-8. One thing that sucked was saving your code on paper tape rolls and tieing it with a rubber band. Still got a few rolls laying around here. Then when I got my Apple-II in '77 I was amazed at the expanded repertoir of BASIC commands over that of the college system that cost 100 times as much.