Today in Technology History
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May 1
One of the most popular computer languages in the world, BASIC, was first run on a computer 38 years ago.
The name BASIC stands for "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code." It was designed by two professors at Dartmouth: Dr. John George Kemeny (1926-1992), a veteran of the Manhattan Project who later served as president of Dartmouth; and Dr. Thomas Eugene Kurtz (born 1928), a math and computer science professor.
As its acronym implies, BASIC was easy to learn. It was designed to be used on the huge computers that were then found on college campuses and various government and military sites. Kemeny and Kurtz started working on the language in 1963; the first two BASIC programs were run at about 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964.
Although subsequent computer programming languages were deemed more "efficient" and "elegant," BASIC was so easy that it caught on immediately. Its commands -- such as INPUT, PRINT, and GOTO -- are based on simple English and algebra. Every line of a BASIC program is numbered, making it easy for novices to navigate.
Kemeny and Kurtz didn't copyright or patent BASIC, so it spread quickly. Different versions of BASIC began to crop up almost immediately -- and later, during the era of the small, personal computer, different computer companies began to produce their own customized variations. Even though most of today's computer users never learned BASIC, it's still the first computer language many young programmers study -- and the descendants of BASIC are on most computers including, almost unquestionably, the computer right in front of you.
Related links:
Click here and here to read a bit about the different versions of BASIC.
In the 1980s, Drs. Kemeny and Kurtz released another version of BASIC, "True BASIC," which was supposed to be a new standard to compete with all the BASIC variations that had developed in the previous two decades. You can read about True BASIC here.
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