BASIC

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." 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." (Kemeny 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 also 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 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 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 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). Since BASIC was meant to be a true high-level language, programmers would not need any detailed knowledge of the specific hardware being used either. The initial idea, at least, was that programmers would not have to care about the computer that BASIC happened to be running on.

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. By 1965, General Electric -- on whose computers DTSS and the original BASIC ran -- was offering a commercial time-sharing service that included BASIC (Waldrop 292). 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 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 language as we know it differs among the English-speaking nations around the globe." (Mullish 6) BASIC's openness and widespread adoption, combined with a lack of any enforced standard, meant that the language wasn't as independent of particular hardware as had been hoped.