BASIC
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(→A Brief History of Programming) | (→Dartmouth BASIC and Time-Sharing Minicomputers) | ||
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In 1962, change was sweeping through the remote Dartmouth campus. ''Time'' noted late that year, in article that declared the college was coming "out of the woods," that the school had built a major new arts center and that John Kemeny, who had made full professor at age 27, had built "the best college math department in the country." [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,829487-1,00.html] That year, Kemeny and his colleague Thomas Kurtz had started developing a time-sharing system and a new programming language for the education of all students at Dartmouth -- not just those studying math, science, or engineering. They aimed to make a radical improvement in access to computers and to computer programming. "While the availability of FORTRAN extended computer usage from a handful of experts to thousands of scientific users," Kemeny wrote, "we at Dartmouth envisaged the possibility of millions of people writing their own computer programs." (Man and the Computer p. 30) | In 1962, change was sweeping through the remote Dartmouth campus. ''Time'' noted late that year, in article that declared the college was coming "out of the woods," that the school had built a major new arts center and that John Kemeny, who had made full professor at age 27, had built "the best college math department in the country." [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,829487-1,00.html] That year, Kemeny and his colleague Thomas Kurtz had started developing a time-sharing system and a new programming language for the education of all students at Dartmouth -- not just those studying math, science, or engineering. They aimed to make a radical improvement in access to computers and to computer programming. "While the availability of FORTRAN extended computer usage from a handful of experts to thousands of scientific users," Kemeny wrote, "we at Dartmouth envisaged the possibility of millions of people writing their own computer programs." (Man and the Computer p. 30) | ||
| − | To reach millions, Kemeny and Kurtz would clearly have to significantly lower the existing barriers to programming, barriers which were related not only to the esoterics of programming languages but to the material nature of programming. The two began developing the Dartmouth Timesharing System, and with it the BASIC programming language. They considered developing a subset of FORTRAN or Algol, but found this unsuitable and instead set to work, with a team of undergraduates, at developing a new language (Masterminds of Programming p. 79). They saw the value of an interactive time-sharing system for allowing users to quickly correct minor errors rather than coming back 24 hours later with a new stack of punched cards for their next scheduled batch job. They also relaxed some of the specific requirements that were tied to using keypunch machines and cards. Kurtz told an interviewer, "we wanted ... to get away from the requirements that punched cards imposed on users, which was that things had to be on certain columns on the card." (Masterminds of Programming p. 81) Oddly enough, BASIC was so relaxed that spaces between tokens were optional in Dartmouth's versions of the language. Spaces were ignored, as Kurtz explains, because "some people, especially faculty members, couldn't type very well." (MoP p. 81) This aspect of Dartmouth BASIC was carried over onto the Commodore 64, as mentioned in the introduction. | + | To reach millions, Kemeny and Kurtz would clearly have to significantly lower the existing barriers to programming, barriers which were related not only to the esoterics of programming languages but to the material nature of programming. The two began working with a team of undergraduates to develop the Dartmouth Timesharing System, and with it the BASIC programming language. They considered developing a subset of FORTRAN or Algol, but found these options unsuitable (Masterminds of Programming p. 79). As Kurtz told an interviewer, "we wanted ... to get away from the requirements that punched cards imposed on users, which was that things had to be on certain columns on the card." (Masterminds of Programming p. 81) They saw the value of an interactive time-sharing system for allowing users to quickly correct minor errors rather than coming back 24 hours later with a new stack of punched cards for their next scheduled batch job. They also relaxed some of the specific requirements that were tied to using keypunch machines and cards. Oddly enough, BASIC was so relaxed that spaces between tokens were optional in Dartmouth's versions of the language. Spaces were ignored, as Kurtz explains, because "some people, especially faculty members, couldn't type very well." (MoP p. 81) This aspect of Dartmouth BASIC was carried over onto the Commodore 64, as mentioned in the introduction. |
BASIC was designed in other ways to help new programmers, with "error messages that were clear and friendly" and default options that would satisfy most users' needs (9). "If the expert needs something fancier," Kemeny and Kurtz declared, "let the expert do the extra work!" (11). And, BASIC was meant to be a true high-level language, so that programmers would not need any detailed knowledge of the specific hardware being used. | BASIC was designed in other ways to help new programmers, with "error messages that were clear and friendly" and default options that would satisfy most users' needs (9). "If the expert needs something fancier," Kemeny and Kurtz declared, "let the expert do the extra work!" (11). And, BASIC was meant to be a true high-level language, so that programmers would not need any detailed knowledge of the specific hardware being used. | ||
