The Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC)
Developed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1963. This ran on the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS) which was an early time sharing system running on Honeywell and GE Main Frames with Datanet systems running the terminal interfaces.
This system was intended to be an online code/run/debug cycle system rather than a batch processing system like most Cobol and Fortran compilers were.
BASIC was actually their third language attempt to simplify the syntax of languages like Fortran and Algol.
There are literally 100's of dialects of BASIC, both as compilers (as was the original) and interpreters and even pseudo compilers.
Like many of us older members of this thread, some form of BASIC was our "computer milk language" (our first computer language).
Some early microcomputers even wrote their operating systems in some form of BASIC.
I learned basic in September of 1972 on a 4K PDP-8/L running EduSystem 10 Basic with time also spent at the Kiewit Computation Center at Dartmouth (as a 12 year old) running Dartmouth Basic.
Let's hear your earliest introduction to BASIC. On 5/1/2024 5:03 PM, Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote:
Nostalgia keeps pressing ahead: It was 60 yrs. ago that BASIC came into existence. I remember very well writing in Apple Basic and GW Basic later on. As a non-compiled OS, an interpreted OS, it was just the right tool for a microcomputer with limited memory. I recall fondly taking code from popular magazines and getting them to run. It was thrilling indeed! Happy computing, Murray 🙂
