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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."
The program was:
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
And it is still running to this day.
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.
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Perhaps I should have stolen the code for the compiler & sold it to hobbyists, who knows I might be rich now......
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I learned BBC Basic on old Acorn Archimedies computers, I always found it very intuitive and consistant in it's structure. A great language.
BBC Basic for Windows is still going too, pretty good product though not really good for anything "serious" in my opinion. But then again, thats Basic for you.
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...
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Now, scoot back on your seat, me boy! Your mother doesn't like to think she's wasted all these ears, and you can't yet sit decently at the table!
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Well, consider this was 1964, it might have been a computed goto ...
In any case, this was not a language intended for software developers (like Algol). Nor was it a language intended for scientists (like Fortran). It was intended for CS students. Goto is desirable for demonstrating simple models of computation.
Dartmouth Basic had if/then, gosub, and for/next loops, which were much less gawdawful than Fortran's Do loops. It had fewer than a dozen functions, but they were well chosen to give students the ability to do interesting, non-trivial stuff.
I started programming maybe a dozen years after Dartmouth BASIC was introduced, and many of the interpreted language options available were not nearly so clean and well thought out.
Of course, that in part was the downfall of BASIC; it was well enough designed for its purpose that its impact was much larger than its target audience. Extending the language and libraries to such a wide variety of practical uses diluted the virtues of its original design. It was no longer a minimalistic language and runtime environment for students to learn and demonstrate concepts and for academics to do computations in. Its descendants became the patronizing choice when you targeted people who you assumed unable to learn anything better.
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In the seventies, all the undergraduates whose computer science courses used PASCAL thought themselves to be very superior beings and looked down their noses at any hobbyist hacking away in BASIC. They would usually parrot a distorted echo of Dijkstra's famous rant, which had perhaps been conveyed to them, accurately or inaccurately, by a teaching assistant, and tell you that it was a scientific fact that BASIC rotted your brain.
So for the record it's worth noting that Dijkstra wasn't ranting against BASIC, specifically. He was ranting against anything that wasn't ALGOL or a derivative thereof, and he was equally harsh about the other major languages of the day:
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.
FORTRAN, 'the infantile disorder', by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
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