1 May
2024
1 May
'24
10:26 p.m.
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.
On 5/1/2024 5:03 PM, Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote:
Nostalgia keeps pressing ahead: It was 60 yrs. ago
that BASIC came into
existence. I remember very well writing in Apple Basic and GW Basic later
on. As a non-compiled OS, an interpreted OS, it was just the right tool for
a microcomputer with limited memory. I recall fondly taking code from
popular magazines and getting them to run. It was thrilling indeed!
Happy computing,
Murray 🙂