scrapbook

BASIC computer language turns 40

10 PRINT "In 1963 two Dartmouth College math professors had a radical"
20 PRINT "idea - create a computer language muscular enough to harness"
30 PRINT "the power of the period?s computers, yet simple enough that even"
40 PRINT "the school's janitors could use it."
50 END

A year later on May 1, 1964, the BASIC computer programing language (as demonstrated above) was born and for the first time computers were taken out of the lab and brought into the community.

"This is the birth of personal computing," said Arthur Luehrmann, a former Dartmouth physics professor who is writing a book about how the Hanover, N.H., school developed the language.

"It was personal computing before people knew what personal computing was."

Forty years later pure BASIC (Beginners? All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) has all but disappeared, but its legacy lives on in some programing languages, including much of what powers the Internet.

Paul Vick, a senior developer at Microsoft, said his company owes much to BASIC, which was its first product.

"Both Windows and Office really would not have made it as far as they have without the support of the BASIC language," he said, noting that both products still use a descendent of BASIC called Visual Basic.

BASIC came about in an age when computers were large, expensive and the exclusive province of scientists, many of whom were forced to buy research time on the nation?s handful of machines.

Dartmouth math professors Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny envisioned something better, an unprecedented system that would give their entire school ? from the faculty to the food service staff ? simultaneous access to a computer.

"It?s hard to give young folks a feel for what it was like back then. It was pretty crude," Kurtz said in a recent interview. "It really was very hard to get anything done with computers and punch cards." Kemeny died in 1992.

Using existing technology called time sharing, the men created a primitive network to allow multiple users to access a single computer at the same time via terminals scattered around the campus.

They also needed a programming language simple enough for anyone to use. With the help of students, the men spent a year developing a commonsense language that relied on basic equations and commands, such as PRINT, LIST and SAVE.

John McGeachie was one of the first students to work with Kurtz and Kemeny and was there at 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, when BASIC came to life in the basement of Dartmouth?s College Hall.

Two terminals hooked up to a single computer ran two different programs.

"I don?t think anybody knew how it would end up catching on," said McGeachie, now 61 and a software designer. "It was just enormously exciting for us as students to be working on something so many people said couldn?t be done."

By working with time-sharing technology, BASIC essentially became time management for a computer, allowing it to focus its processing power a few seconds at a time on a multitude of programs being run from different terminals.

"It gave people an enormous improvement in responsiveness and the feeling that while they were sitting there at some teletype in some closet somewhere off in some department that they had full use of the computer," said Kurtz, 76.

"The thing just took off like crazy after that," he said.

Within a short time nearly everyone at Dartmouth ? a humanities-based college ? had some BASIC experience. And it wasn?t long before the business community took notice.

Kurtz said that by 1970 nearly 100 companies used BASIC systems to share and sell time on computers. And when computers eventually entered the consumer market, most used BASIC.

"More people in the world know or have known how to program in BASIC than any other computer language," Kurtz said, noting that most contemporary computer languages are too difficult for the layman to tackle.

This was long before the days of software on CDs or even floppy disks. Programs for home use mostly were sold as books with hundreds of pages of code a user had to enter one line at a time.

The popularity of BASIC waned as computers got more sophisticated and newer languages were developed to take advantage of the power. Many of those languages, including the Internet?s Java, have their roots in BASIC.

Harry McCracken, editor-in-chief of PC World magazine, laments BASIC?s demise.

"On some level I think it?s sad that it went away," he said. "People went from being creators of software to consumers."

BASIC still is available commercially. In addition to Microsoft?s Visual Basic, copies of True BASIC ? a much closer relative to the language Kurtz and Kemeny designed ? are sold by John Lutz, of Hartford, Vt.

He sells about 3,000 copies a year, mostly to high schools and hobbyists who learned it decades ago.

"We?re finding that that group is right at retirement age, is still using computers and is delighted to pick up where they left off in the ?70s," Kurtz said.

Posted by thinkum at April 29, 2004 01:09 PM