Today, May 1, 2024, marks the diamond anniversary of the BASIC programming language!
Sixty years ago, Dartmouth students were presented with the first-ever time-sharing system built on a GE-225 by Dartmouth staff with the help of several undergraduate students. They were encouraged to program in BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), created by two Dartmouth professors, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, in 1963. On May 1, 1964, at around 4:00 a.m., the system was available to all students.
This was exactly two months before President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. Dartmouth’s student population at the time was all male and predominantly white, with only a handful of black students. Although women provided a significant support structure on the Dartmouth campus, they could not attend classes until 1971. Through Kemeny’s urging, the Board finally permitted women to apply in 1972.
What made this period particularly interesting was Kemeny’s push for computers to be instrumental in their students’ future. Hence, no student would graduate from Dartmouth without having written programs to solve problems related to their coursework. This was the intent, and with a few exceptions, this was mostly the case.
Kemeny wanted students to learn programming without the complexity of languages like FORTRAN or COBOL, which are scientific and business-oriented, respectively. It was the idea of making the language general and accessible and removing the complexity of the mathematics behind the technology. This concept is practiced at many institutions where instructors drive the use of programming languages to create art and where language instruction would be considered non-traditional or out-of-order.
BASIC bridged the complexity gap. The syntax could be learned in a week, and learners could achieve mastery in a month or two.
Fast-forward just ten years, and that same computing ability began to enter our homes. The MITS Altair was created in 1974, and in 1977, the personal computer became a reality with three specific releases: Radio Shack’s Tandy TRS-80, the Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor), and the now famous Apple II. All of these ran BASIC, so much so that Microsoft released a version that nearly all subsequent vendors licensed for their computers.
Dartmouth students did write programs, but they also wrote and played games. These were text-based games with lots of paper output from teletype machines and limited input sources. The simplicity of BASIC was a key reason for the proliferation of many games during this era. Years later, graphics would be king, making the games more visually appealing, and the joystick made the games easier to play. One game is still renowned and was turned into a tabletop board and card game: The Oregon Trail.
BASIC never really went away. It’s still here today, and Microsoft is still at the heart of it all. Visual Basic 6 formally ended support in 1998 but continued as part of the .NET framework 23 years ago and is still maintained today.
If you’d like to play a game or two from that era, you can try the TRS-80 version of The Oregon Trail and a version of Snake that both run on a Commodore 64 emulator in your browser. (Snake uses W, A, S, and D keys for up, left, down, and right, respectively.)
References
https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2013/06/forty-years-changing-face-dartmouth
https://web.archive.org/web/20140514095400/http://thedartmouth.com/1995/02/28/news/women-at-dartmouth-a-history-filled-with-controversy
https://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/flipbook/c1977_rsc-01.html
A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin
https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1964/#169ebbe2ad45559efbc6eb35720efd56
https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1982/#169ebbe2ad45559efbc6eb357202f394