BASIC

In 1975, another BASIC was developed for the Altair thanks to volunteer programmers and the nonprofit People's Computer Company (PCC). Bob Albrecht, who had founded "probably the world's first completely free, walk-in, public computer center -- People's Computer Center -- in a storefront in Menlo Park, California" (Dr. Dobbs @ 30) was one of many, along with Paul Allen, who had seen the ''Popular Electronics'' cover story on the MITS Altair. He discussed it with Dennis Allison, who taught at Stanford, and Allison began to develop a specification for a limited BASIC interpreter called Tiny BASIC. In a collaborative hobbyist spirit, Allison's documents were published by Albrecht in three parts in issues of the PCC newsletter, a serial which had been running since October 1972. At the conclusion of this Allison's series of specifications, Allison called for programmers to send in their implementations and offered to circulate them to anyone who sent a self-addressed stamped envelope.

The first interpreter written in response to this call was by Dick Whipple and John Arnold and was developed in December 1975. To disseminate it, Albrecht and Allison decided to start a new serial, initially photocopied and originally intended to just run for a few issues. This was ''Dr. Dobb's Journal of Tiny BASIC Calisthenics and Orthodontia,'' which had the printed code for the interpreter in hexadecimal machine language, ready for hobbyists to toggle in or (hopefully) key in on their Teletypes. It would be an understatement to call this publication a success. By January of 1976 the journal title was made more general by removing the explicit mention of ''Tiny BASIC,'' an editor was hired, and ''Dr. Dobb's'' launched as a newsletter offering code and articles on computing topics. The journal ran as a print publication until 2009, and was sent monthly to 120,000 who requested it. In 1985, it published Richard Stallman's "GNU Manifesto."

[More on Tiny BASIC, the canonical version 4, etc.]