2 May
2024
2 May
'24
1:22 p.m.
On May 1, 2024, at 6:26 PM, Mike Katz via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
The Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC)
Developed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1963. This ran
on the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS) which was an early time sharing system running
on Honeywell and GE Main Frames with Datanet systems running the terminal interfaces.
This system was intended to be an online code/run/debug cycle system rather than a batch
processing system like most Cobol and Fortran compilers were.
BASIC was actually their third language attempt to simplify the syntax of languages like
Fortran and Algol.
There are literally 100's of dialects of BASIC, both as compilers (as was the
original) and interpreters and even pseudo compilers.
Like many of us older members of this thread, some form of BASIC was our "computer
milk language" (our first computer language).
Some early microcomputers even wrote their operating systems in some form of BASIC.
I learned basic in September of 1972 on a 4K PDP-8/L running EduSystem 10 Basic with time
also spent at the Kiewit Computation Center at Dartmouth (as a 12 year old) running
Dartmouth Basic.
Let's hear your earliest introduction to BASIC.
BASIC was my fourth language, after ALGOL-60, FORTRAN-II, and Philips PR8000 assembler.
The first version I met was BASIC-PLUS, on RSTS-11. That's a compiler (to threaded
code, like P-code, not to machine code). Soon after that I worked on RT-11 BASIC, which
is an interpreter, and modified it to be a lab machine control system with interrupts and
analog and digital I/O.
Someone commented on "what if the first PCs had run APL". Shortly after reading
the famous "Tablet" paper (Stephen Wolfram and his students at U of Illinois) I
played a bit with that notion: a tablet computer supporting APL so you could program
quickly because it requires so few characters per unit of work. The crucial miss in that
concept is that PCs are not sold (primarily) to programmers but to application users, and
for that an APL-focused machine is no advantage.
paul