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."

Comments

Was FORTRAN really that hard?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I mean Basic isn't difficult either, but I really don't understand the perspective at the time that FORTRAN was so complex that BASIC and COBOL were really needed for their syntax changes alone. All of the explinations I've read about them, invariably have the line somewhere about FORTRAN being so difficult to understand that only scientists could master it. I understand they were all invented for different problem domains and that's kind of a good reason in and of itself, but sheesh, its not like it was brain fudge.

Re:Was FORTRAN really that hard?

[Brett Buck]

It isn't hard. I think the only issue that anyone has had with it was the column restrictions, and the important development there was interactive computing and a decent text editor, not a new language.

    Bear in mind, also, that most people haven't ever attempted to write in original FORTRAN. Most have seen nothing earlier than FORTRAN 77 and that was tremendously easier and far less irritating than FORTRAN IV. I am old enough to have written FORTRAN IV on card decks, the "good old days" sucked for the most part.

    I always found BASIC to be far more irritating to program in anything more than trivial applications.

      I don't think the language is the problem, it was all other things that where difficult and mostly solved in the 60's and 70's.

      FORTRAN is certainly still in use for Real Programming. I haven't seen a way to use BASIC- in the way it was originally conceived - in 25 years.

         

Re:Was FORTRAN really that hard?

[tangent]

FORTRAN wasn't the language in 1964 that you think of as FORTRAN today.

Most people's concept of FORTRAN is FORTRAN 77 or its descendants, which was 13 years in the future from BASIC's introduction.

At the time of BASIC's introduction, FORTRAN IV was the current version.

FORTRAN wouldn't be ANSI-fied for another two years as FORTRAN 66, so every version had machine-specific features. Also, because FORTRAN's development was largely driven by IBM until FORTRAN 66, all the non-IBM versions were "nonstandard." Imagine if, today, every computer came with a C compiler and there were no ANSI or ISO standard to constrain its behavior. The last common reference would have been K&R '78.

Another fun feature of early FORTRAN was fixed column layout, common among languages invented in the punched card era. That is, you had to do things like start all statements in column 7 or later, because the first 6 columns had other meaning.

Early FORTRANs also had very primitive program structuring concepts, hardly raised from the level of assembly language.

Read through the Wikipedia article. You'll probably be shocked at how primitive FORTRAN was in the early 1960s.

Re:Was FORTRAN really that hard?

[RabidReindeer]

FORTRAN isn't that complex. Originally, it only had 7 statements (or was it 10)? The only halfway complex thing about it was the expression compiler parts.

But BASIC had several advantages. It was intended for interactive use, at a time when most FORTRANs were batch-only. It originally only supported a very limited set of variable names like "A", "B", "C", and so forth, meaning that you didn't have to implement symbol table logic, and the associated storages on machines when 16K RAM space might be considered at lot - instead the variable name was the hash code to a value table. Refinements such as the rich set of built-in functions and extensive string services were also later additions.

The original BASIC was so minimalist that even the first effort from Gates &Co. exceeded it. But it introduced a lot of people to "instant gratification" programming, and thus its influence can be felt in many places to this day.

Thank you Kemeny and Kurtz.

[DiscountBorg(TM)]

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!

Happy Birthday

[Captain Emerald]

10 PRINT "Happy Birthday, Basic"
20 GOTO 10