BASIC
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| − | 10 PRINT is a computer program that operates in a particular way; it is also written in a particular programming language, BASIC. This "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code" has an interesting cultural and technical history. BASIC was developed by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, two professors at Dartmouth College; it became operational in 1964 and was freely shared by its creators, leading to widespread use in high schools among other contexts. By that time, general-purpose computers had been programmed for about two decades and high-level languages had been in widespread use for a decade. While BASIC has important, distinguishing features, it also continues the history of high-level languages, building on what Fortran, Algol, and other languages accomplished. | + | 10 PRINT is a computer program that operates in a particular way; it is also written in a particular programming language, BASIC. This "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code" has an interesting cultural and technical history. BASIC was developed by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, two professors at Dartmouth College; it became operational in 1964 and was freely shared by its creators, leading to widespread use in education, at the high school as well as college level. By that time, general-purpose computers had been programmed for about two decades and high-level languages had been in widespread use for a decade. While BASIC has important, distinguishing features, it also continues the history of high-level languages, building on what Fortran, Algol, and other languages accomplished. |
BASIC's invention in an educational context signals one important aspect of its use. The language was developed an important early time-sharing environment, the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System. This sort of setup was revolutionary in allowing many programmers to use a single system interactively at the same time. The configuration of such a system, with many terminals connected to a mainframe or minicomputer, was very different from that of the personally owned, inexpensive, single-user computers of the microcomputer era. It was also very different from the batch processing of stacks of punched cards, though. Time sharing allowed people to engage with and explore computation in significant new ways, and BASIC was an important part of this computing revolution. | BASIC's invention in an educational context signals one important aspect of its use. The language was developed an important early time-sharing environment, the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System. This sort of setup was revolutionary in allowing many programmers to use a single system interactively at the same time. The configuration of such a system, with many terminals connected to a mainframe or minicomputer, was very different from that of the personally owned, inexpensive, single-user computers of the microcomputer era. It was also very different from the batch processing of stacks of punched cards, though. Time sharing allowed people to engage with and explore computation in significant new ways, and BASIC was an important part of this computing revolution. | ||
