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50 Years of BASIC, the Language That Made Computers Personal
harrymcc (1641347) writes "On May 1, 1964 at 4 a.m. in a computer room at Dartmouth University, the first programs written in BASIC ran on the university's brand-new time-sharing system. With these two innovations, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz didn't just make it easier to learn how to program a computer: They offered Dartmouth students a form of interactive, personal computing years before the invention of the PC. Over at TIME.com, I chronicle BASIC's first 50 years with a feature with thoughts from Kurtz, Microsoft's Paul Allen and many others."
I grew up with a little TRS-80 on which you had to learn BASIC to so much as load a file. In Grade Three I was learning things like coordinate geometry and algebra, while my peers were struggling with their multiplication tables. I remember when my peers were introduced to algebra for the first time, some of them had difficulty understanding how x could be a number, while I was busy making adventure games at home.
Thanks to this head start in life, I now have a job in IT. BASIC gave me a great head start in computer literacy!
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
10 PRINT "Happy Birthday, Basic"
20 GOTO 10
Ob. quote from Real Programmers.
"Real programmers don't write in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is for pipe stress freaks and crystallography weenies."
Of course, it also says this about BASIC :-)
"Real Programmers don't write in BASIC. Actually, no programmers write in BASIC, after the age of 12."
That's not really a good idea, Basic is hardly thread-safe!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.