Birth of BASIC

Professors John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz along with a band of Dartmouth undergraduates invent the Basic computer language.

[fitfogey]

I programmed in BASIC for the first time in 1981 when I was 9 years old on a TI/99 4A that my parents sacrificed a lot of money to purchase for me. They saw the future that I didn’t yet have the ability to see. Since then I have had a great career working for Boeing, NASA, and a variety of other great places. I owe it all to BASIC and the introduction to computing in general. These early pioneers were true geniuses.

[Robert]

My father pulled what I have come to call "the standard dad trick". I had pestered him a few times for a kit computer so we could build it together, but he flatly refused. At the beginning of Summer, 1979, he bought HIMSELF a TRS-80, model 1 level 1. I was not allowed to touch it. All I could do is watch while he used it. For a few nights at least, all I could do was drool and watch him learn how to program. Finally, he said I could try it but ONLY if he was present and I had to use my own tapes so as not to erase any of his. I started in and was mesmerized. For about 1-2 hours every evening, I would sit and learn how to program it in BASIC. Then reluctantly release it to him so he could put an hour in on his own. I don't know when it happened exactly; but soon, I was allowed to use it whenever I wanted to. I would start in the early after noon (summertime) work up until supper, then another 3 - 4 hours in the evening. After a few months, my father asked me to move it off his desk... over to MY desk!!! The significance of this was lost on me at the time. But his objective was accomplished. He knew I was hooked.

Many years later he revealed why he never bought the kit computer. He had heard stories of people buying and trying to assemble them only to fail, become frustrated at the difficulties and expense and abandon the hobby. He wasn't sure HE could assemble it let alone what my solder joints would look like. And he didn't want my first attempt with computers to be frustrating. That's why he bought a fully assembled and tested computer from Radio Shack.

[jmpa]

That short story while rolling the end credits is moving enough to make a grown man cry. What a testament of Kemeny that was.

[thatguyinelnorte]

These guys made me love computers when I discovered BASIC in 1976.

[fredfarnackle]

Wow! What a story, I really enjoyed it. I did a BASIC course at the Australian National University in 1975, been messing with computers ever since - I am now 81 years old and still doing it.

[donshepherd]

What a wonderful video. I was writing BASIC code on those teletype machines at the University of Louisville in 1972 and I loved it. That was the beginning of my career in programming. I am now retired, but I want to publicly thank Professors Kemeny and Kurtz and all of those who made BASIC possible.

[pierrelacroix]

I was 15 when I started programming with Basic in september 1980, thanks to a priest who paid half the cost of 6 PET Commodore computers because the school would not pay for it. I am forever grateful to this man for sharing so generously his passion for programming. Thanks Gilles Marceau for changing many lives.

[thatdudefeomtheinternet]

I remember as a kid, copying games in BASIC out of magazines to run on my computer. After a while, you started figuring out the commands were and how the syntax was layed out. After a while, my friends and I were making our own "basic" games. I think in the 80's it was every kid's entry point in to computing.

[ronharris]

I was a "Kiewit Systems Programmer" from 1968 till 1971. We were all undergraduates, most of us with no computer experience when we came to Dartmouth. Thanks to Professor Kemeny, we got an incredible education in computing, and we got paid! Professor Kemeny was a visionary, an incredible leader. He was also a teacher to the core. The choice to depend on inexperienced undergraduates to invent what was, for that time, a cutting edge system, took courage. I believe that Professor Kemeny made that choice to give us a learning opportunity we could not have gotten in a classroom.

Several of the speakers in this video had returned to campus while I was there, and were also great teachers and mentors.

I can not begin to express my gratitude for the opportunity Professor Kemeny and Dartmouth gave me.

[rw]

As a Dartmouth student from 1968-1972, I had the opportunity to begin using BASIC as soon as I arrived on campus. As I recall, every single one of us freshmen were guided into Kiewit (the computer center), personally introduced to the DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing System), seated in front of a terminal and personally taught how to operate the terminal and get on the system. All of us = 800 or so freshmen. We all had the opportunity to learn to write BASIC even before our first classes were to begin. I learned to do so. Later on, during the winter term of my sophomore year, I took an introductory course in what I would label "survey research sociology" (Sociology 8), taught by Professor Jim Davis, a brilliant guy. During that course we were taught all sorts of ways of statistically analyzing data to create multi-variable causal models designed to provide insights into causes and/or correlates of political opinions, population growth rates, all sorts of things. We then composed our theories, sat at terminals and ran PROJECT IMPRESS, a unique timesharing program which analyzed data from various surveys. Thereafter we wrote papers touting our theories and justifying them through the use of PROJECT IMPRESS results. We thought nothing of using a full second or more of computer time. It was a remarkable era. Alas, I graduated, went to law school across the country at UCBerkeley and never knew what transpired thereafter. What a great major, great professors, great college and great time. I will forever miss it.

[NoelKropf]

I worked on DTSS - Dartmouth Time Sharing operating system - as an undergraduate from 1972 to 1976. John Kemeny was no longer involved day to day but many of the folks in this video were still involved. That time and that experience and the other folks I worked with provided me with a basis for a wonderful career. I took an advanced math course in probability and statistics taught by Kemeny. His teaching was excellent, he made the material come alive.

[ruththomas]

I took a class in BASIC in 1983 when my middle son, age 13, was learning it in school. We would write simple programs together on his computer. If the only thing it did for me was to bring my son and I together more -- no small feat with a teenage boy -- then it was worth it. He soon outpaced me. He went on to ITT and has had a very successful career because of his love for things technical, logical and mathematical. I really enjoyed this history video.

[philbateman]

I'm a programming lecturer today (since 2017), and it's hard to express when teaching how unbelievably smart these guys are/were. BASIC was the first programming language I worked with in the early 90s, and it was considered kind of old even then, but it made programming more accessible that it had ever been. I mainly teach C++ and C#, and I'm standing on the shoulders of giants in terms of how incredible the work these guys did to enable the work of programming for the average person was.

[TheRootedWord]

I learned BASIC on the TRS-80 in 1979 in Kirkland Washington, near Redmond where Microsoft has its main campus. It was my introduction to computers. In 1997 I started my first company in Seattle, an IT firm focusing on Security and Data Recovery. Today I am in Ukraine working on a couple of companies centered around the IT industry. Thank you Dartmouth. I did not know you were the daddy of BASIC.

[BrainPunter]

As a freshman at Dartmouth, I started learning BASIC in 1964 in the attic of the engineering building. There were 4 teletypes with paper tapes there and we quickly learned to write a line of code, make a paper tape, then another line of code, another tape and so on. Reason, of course was the machine was going down frequently and you could feed the paper tape back in and not lose what you were creating. Today, 60 years later, I earn my living programming in BASIC ! I've had clients in the US, England, Europe, and South Africa. I've never met most of my clients, but they have become good friends. That little programming language and that big idea is still going strong.

[mhoover]

I learned BASIC when I built my first computer, an Altair, in 1975. I went on to have a 16 year career at the phone company as an analyst/software engineer. I wrote almost everything in BASIC. Thanks guys, you made this highschool graduate's career possible.

[IanSlothieRolfe]

In 1975 when I was 12 my Fathers company Ilford Films) bought a Honeywell Time Sharing system and trained a lot of the management in production control where he worked. He brought all the training materials home, and I taught myself BASIC and wrote some programs, which he would take to work and type in during his lunch hour and bring home the results, sometimes making minor corrections but he always made me work out what he had done first. Because of this I opted to do a computer studies course as my "O" level options, and ended up going to Exeter University )UK) to do a Computer Studies degree.

I never realized at the time how new BASIC was, really, having been invented shortly after I was born. BASIC certainly transformed computing, making it accessable to millions of people who would otherwise probablly never had access to computers, or the time to learn enough to make use of them.

[oldestgamer]

The thing I enjoyed most was that for Kemeny, it was having his students excel into the future. To be so free with your knowledge and desirous of the next generation to succeed is the definition of selflessness and greatness. Thank you Mr. Kemeny!

[jameswilson]

I too learned to program in BASIC on an 8K Commodore PET. I am now 83 years old and have been a Scratch user for the last 14 years. As students were eager to learn BASIC, they are just as eager to program in Scratch which now has (I think) around 50 million registered users most of which are youngsters. Thanks for this wonderful, historic video.

[redpillcommando]

BASIC was the first computer language I learned in 1981. My professor was Dr. C. Mark Aulick (RIP) . He was the best professor anyone could ask for. He could teach a box of rocks how to program a computer. I know this to be true because I am living proof. I punched my program into cards and took them to the "computer room" that did not in fact have a computer, it was just a card reader and a modem connected to the main campus at LSU Baton Rouge Louisiana, I was at LSU-S in Shreveport Louisiana. My first computer class was taken with the attitude of "Know thy Enemy" because it seem to me at the time that just about every pain in my ass could be traced back to a computer. Instead, I learned a very important lesson from Dr. Aulick, this is GIGO or Garbage in Garbage out. I also learned that I loved working with computers and I had a knack for it. It helped me find a career, a life and a wonderful little wife.

My first personal computer had 4 kilobytes of RAM and it's display was a black and white TV. It ran BASIC and I was absolutely drunk with the power at my fingertips. You kids live in an age of wonders, you just don't know it.