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On This Date in 1964, the First BASIC Program
palegray.net notes that on this day in 1964, the first BASIC program was run. From the Wired article:"Mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz had been trying to make computing more accessible to their undergraduate students. One problem was that available computing languages like Fortran and Algol were so complex that you really had to be a professional to use them. BASIC is still alive and well these days, from Microsoft's VB.net to cross-platform variants like REALbasic. For the old-school among us, there's always Joshua Bell's Apple II BASIC emulator implemented in Javascript."
I'm a little older :-(
:-) Green plastic in a cardboard sleeve.
Still, BASIC was the first language I used in CS at school in 1975. Then FORTRAN IV. Fond memories.
I still have my coveted IBM flowchart template
Perhaps I should have stolen the code for the compiler & sold it to hobbyists, who knows I might be rich now......
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
I'm not karma-whoring but since I had just checked it out, so to whoever is curious, BASIC stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
w00t
You can get one of the (original?) manuals from a Bitsaver mirror site:
http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dartmouth/BASIC_Oct64.pdf
And, their original 'hello world' program does linear algebra (page "9")
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Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
There, consider yourselves enlightened.
I found that out from an article in PC format, back in the long ago.
Also, for the 'it's not a language' crowd, it *was* for those of us who were learning how to program back then. Ok, I wouldn't use it now, but I really enjoyed it in the eighties.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
...the oldtimers are still keeping the dream alive at (www.dtss.org. Tom Kurtz and others have coded up emulators for the original system software (DTSS, the Dartmouth Time Sharing System), and the site has a repository of old docs, including the Dartmouth BASIC compiler source (warning, PDF). There's a trove of historical info there on the birth of BASIC, too.
Kemeny himself was largely responsible for the revolution in computing, at least at Dartmouth, and his influence went way beyond developing BASIC. The man went from being a brilliant mathematician and computer scientist to being a brilliant mathematician/CS prof/president of the college. He saw that computing would be ubiquitous -- someday -- and issued every student a network ID. In the mid-70s. There were teletypes all over campus (in the performing arts center, even!) where everyone was invited to log on.
Sidenote, as related to me by a Dartmouth math/philosophy prof: Kemeny led the school into the era of coeducation, and expanded student enrollment by about a third when women came. Problem was, this put the college way over its housing capacity. So, being who he was, he ran a series of simulations on the mainframe to figure out how to cram 1.3n where there had previously been n students -- staggering schedules, stretching semesters, you name it. The result was the strange/unique Dartmouth program where all sophomores attend for the summer quarter, and are forced off campus/abroad during the "regular" school year. I can't help but admire the guy's approach to the knapsack problem in a different context...