BASIC
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(→Dartmouth BASIC and Time-Sharing Minicomputers) | (→Dartmouth BASIC and Time-Sharing Minicomputers) | ||
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The practice of numbering program statements by multiples of five or ten is not merely aesthetic; the insertion of new lines in a program requires that, as the 1964 manual puts it, "the original line numbers <ins>not</ins> be consecutive numbers" (22). Numbering a program 10, 20, 30, and so on ensured that between every existing program statement there was room for nine more. It was an acknowledgement that the program is dynamic rather than fixed and perfect. The ''Commodore 64 User's Guide'' also advises that "it is good programming practice to number lines in increments of 10--in case you need to insert some statements later on" (33). | The practice of numbering program statements by multiples of five or ten is not merely aesthetic; the insertion of new lines in a program requires that, as the 1964 manual puts it, "the original line numbers <ins>not</ins> be consecutive numbers" (22). Numbering a program 10, 20, 30, and so on ensured that between every existing program statement there was room for nine more. It was an acknowledgement that the program is dynamic rather than fixed and perfect. The ''Commodore 64 User's Guide'' also advises that "it is good programming practice to number lines in increments of 10--in case you need to insert some statements later on" (33). | ||
| − | Dartmouth's own time-sharing system, DTSS, and the versions of BASIC that ran on it served almost all of the students at that college - Kemeny stated in 1971 that 90% of seven classes of freshmen had received computer training. Access to Dartmouth's system extended to many other campuses, and it was not the only time-sharing system with BASIC. Before the microcomputer revolution, other college and university students were taking required courses in computing using BASIC - at NYU's business school, for instance. Even before the arrival of home computers with built-in BASIC, the language had extensive, if not pervasive, influence. | + | Dartmouth's own time-sharing system, DTSS, and the versions of BASIC that ran on it served almost all of the students at that college - Kemeny stated in 1971 that 90% of seven classes of freshmen had received computer training. Access to Dartmouth's system extended to many other campuses, and it was not the only time-sharing system with BASIC. Before the microcomputer revolution, other college and university students were taking required courses in computing using BASIC - at NYU's business school, for instance. Even before the arrival of home computers with built-in BASIC, the language had extensive, if not pervasive, influence. And even before the microcomputer era and the full toppling of BASIC's Tower of Babel, the permissive attitude of Kemeny and Kurtz had led to many different implementations of BASIC for different systems. Writing in 1975, one author commented: "BASIC systems differ among themselves in much the same way that the English langauge as we know it differs among the English-speaking nations around the globe." (Mullish p. 6) |
== Altair BASIC, Micro-Soft, and Microcomputers == | == Altair BASIC, Micro-Soft, and Microcomputers == | ||
