Birth of BASIC and Time Sharing at Dartmouth

[LiberalArkie]

Aug 5, 2014

Professors John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz along with a band of Dartmouth undergraduates invent the Basic computer language.

[tinrobot]

1. That language was the gateway for my lifelong association with computers.

My father worked for General Electric, the company that made the computer where BASIC was first developed. We had a TTY connected to the company mainframe in the house. Being a young nerd, I gravitated towards it, so he tossed me a BASIC manual and I was off.

That was 1972. I got my first job in 1977 programming the Altair 8800 using Microsoft's first product (Tiny BASIC). Wound up getting my degree in computers, then eventually did animation and computer graphics for most of my career.

[LiberalArkie]

2. Although I used some timeshare with 33 teletypes, I really grew with the Radio Shack model 1 and 3

And then off to Coherent Unix on my 8088.

[Ranting Randy]

3. This is great, thanks for bringing this to DU. Here are my 2 cents as well

Computer evolution during 5 years: I learned Basic in high school on a dumb terminal and we saved the program on paper tape! You would then "read in" the paper tape the next time you wanted to run the program.

In college the programs were saved on a deck of IBM punch cards. Also started playing with Fortran and COBOL.

In grad school we wrote fairly useful Basic programs to do some pretty complex budget projections. And then we started using SPSS to do factor analysis and multiple regression to predict the stock market! (I really wish I'd put my money where my brain was as I probably could have retired by age 25).

I wrote my thesis on the main frame computer and saved it on the computer. My advisor said he'd never heard of anyone using a computer for word processing before and my thesis was printed by a dot matrix printer, on green computer paper with sprocket holes along the side.

Regrettably all letters were all capitalized, (you couldn't turn off the caps lock) which made the paper hard to read. IBM Selectric type writers were all the rage then.

Now we've progressed to voice recognition, AI, and next up will be ...thought recognition? Thought police?

I would love for computers to do more of the dull, repetitive work and leave creativity to the humans. However that is not what is happening.

What a long strange trip its been. And what a fast and even stranger trip its going to be.