BASIC

DTSS and the versions of BASIC that ran on it served almost all of the students at Dartmouth; by 1971, 90 percent of the seven most recent classes of freshmen had received computer training. Dartmouth extended access to its system to other campuses, and it also inspired the creation of other time-sharing systems 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). Well before the microcomputer revolution of the late seventies, 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.

While BASIC was a significant project at Dartmouth, it was only one part of the push to expand access to computing that resulted in DTSS, allowed sites all around the East Coast to connect to Dartmouth's computers, and fostered a more productive and creative relationship to computing. In his 1972 book ''Man and the Computer,'' Kemeny defends programming and playing games and other "recreational" uses of the computer as important, writing that such activities are relaxing and help people to overcome their fear of computers (35). Kemeny also describes some of the context in which BASIC programming was done at Dartmouth: "The computation center is run in a manner analogous to Dartmouth's million-volume open-stack library. Just as any student may go in and browse the library or check out any book he wishes without asking for permission or explaining why he wants that particular book, he may use the computation center without asking permission or explaining why he is running a particular program." (Kemeny 33) It was not only the BASIC programming language, but also the development of this permissive attitude toward computing that allowed for programs with no obvious military, business, or scientific purpose -- programs such as 10 PRINT -- to come about.

It's remarkable that Kemeny was able to further his liberal ideas about computers and education from the position he attained in 1970: President of Dartmouth College. He served in that role until 1981, presiding over Dartmouth's conversion to a coeducational campus, removing the "Indian" as the college's mascot, and encouraging efforts at the recruitment of minority students. On his final day as president, he gave a commencement address that warned students, including those involved in the recently-founded conservative ''Dartmouth Review,'' against the impulse that "tries to divide us by setting whites against blacks, by setting Christians against Jews, by setting men against women. And if it succeeds in dividing us from our fellow beings, it will impose its evil will upon a fragmented society" (Faison). After leaving the presidency of Dartmouth, he returned to full-time teaching. He died in 1992. Thomas Kurtz continued to teach at Dartmouth long after he worked on BASIC, directing the Computer and Information Systems program there from 1980 to 1988.