On This Date in 1964, the First BASIC Program

palegray.net notes that on this day in 1964, the first BASIC program was run. From the Wired article:"Mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz had been trying to make computing more accessible to their undergraduate students. One problem was that available computing languages like Fortran and Algol were so complex that you really had to be a professional to use them. BASIC is still alive and well these days, from Microsoft's VB.net to cross-platform variants like REALbasic. For the old-school among us, there's always Joshua Bell's Apple II BASIC emulator implemented in Javascript."

HELLO WORLD

The program was:

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10

And it is still running to this day.

3583 bytes free

Programming a VIC-20 in BASIC...and removing all the spaces to save a few bytes. Oh yeah, those were the days! Now we have terabyte drives. The mind boggles.

BBC Basic!

I learned BBC Basic on old Acorn Archimedies computers, I always found it very intuitive and consistant in it's structure. A great language.

BBC Basic for Windows is still going too, pretty good product though not really good for anything "serious" in my o

Can you really call VB "BASIC"?

Or any variation of so called structured BASIC? Seems like a completely different (set of) language(s) to me, in all but name.

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Indeed, they were pretty different.

I remember in high school using qbasic (I think that's what it was) which was structured with procedures, at least. One of my partners wrote the core code, and I had to refactor it to take advantage of the structured par

Thank you, bitsavers!

You can get one of the (original?) manuals from a Bitsaver mirror site:

http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dartmouth/BASIC_Oct64.pdf [mirrorservice.org]

And, their original 'hello world' program does linear algebra (page "9")

What BASIC means

Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

There, consider yourselves enlightened.
I found that out from an article in PC format, back in the long ago.

Also, for the 'it's not a language' crowd, it *was* for those of us who were learning how to program back then. Ok, I wouldn't use it now, but I really enjoyed it in the eighties.

RealBasic? Try SmallBasic...

BASIC is still alive and well these days, from Microsoft's VB.net to cross-platform variants like REALbasic.

...Or, for those interested in FOSS versions (and more cross-platform to boot), you could try SmallBasic [sourceforge.net].

I first used it because I couldn't fin

Dartmouth BASIC

...the oldtimers are still keeping the dream alive at (www.dtss.org [dtss.org]. Tom Kurtz and others have coded up emulators for the original system software (DTSS, the Dartmouth Time Sharing System), and the site has a repository of old docs, including the Dartmouth BASIC [wikipedia.org] compiler source [dtss.org] (warning, PDF). There's a trove of historical info [dtss.org] there on the birth of BASIC, too.

Kemeny [wikipedia.org] himself was largely responsible for the revolution in computing, at least at Dartmouth, and his influence went way beyond developing BASIC. The man went from being a brilliant mathematician and computer scientist to being a brilliant mathematician/CS prof/president of the college. He saw that computing would be ubiquitous -- someday -- and issued every student a network ID. In the mid-70s. There were teletypes all over campus (in the performing arts center, even!) where everyone was invited to log on.

Sidenote, as related to me by a Dartmouth math/philosophy prof: Kemeny led the school into the era of coeducation, and expanded student enrollment by about a third when women came. Problem was, this put the college way over its housing capacity. So, being who he was, he ran a series of simulations on the mainframe to figure out how to cram 1.3n where there had previously been n students -- staggering schedules, stretching semesters, you name it. The result was the strange/unique Dartmouth program where all sophomores attend for the summer quarter, and are forced off campus/abroad during the "regular" school year. I can't help but admire the guy's approach to the knapsack problem in a different context...

Dijkstra's knock wasn't on BASIC _specifically_

In the seventies, all the undergraduates whose computer science courses used PASCAL thought themselves to be very superior beings and looked down their noses at any hobbyist hacking away in BASIC. They would usually parrot a distorted echo of Dijkstra's famous rant, which had perhaps been conveyed to them, accurately or inaccurately, by a teaching assistant, and tell you that it was a scientific fact that BASIC rotted your brain.

So for the record it's worth noting that Dijkstra wasn't ranting against BASIC, specifically. He was ranting against anything that wasn't ALGOL or a derivative thereof, and he was equally harsh about the other major languages of the day:

"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

FORTRAN, 'the infantile disorder', by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.

In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

GOSUB 1960

I'm a little older :-(

Still, BASIC was the first language I used in CS at school in 1975. Then FORTRAN IV. Fond memories.

I still have my coveted IBM flowchart template :-) Green plastic in a cardboard sleeve.

Perhaps I should have stolen the code for the compiler & sold it to hobbyists, who knows I might be rich now......

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Is that you, Grandpa? =P

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I have a Wilkinson saftey razor from 1936. I still accepts today's blades, and comes in a marvelous little leather case, with a heavy brass zipper. It bows the blade when closed, and this creates a shaving angle on the razor edge, similar to modern cartr

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Likewise - I was coding in BASIC on PDP's *years* before the Apple II came out. Or the Apple I even...

Dialup via a 110-baud acoustic coupler on an ASR-33 teletype - now *that's* "old school"!

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And it's full real name is used about as often as COBOLs...

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Wow! I bow down to your l33t research and citation skillz.

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Gates Wins

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Yes, I did; the editor was terrible. I graduated to QBASIC as soon as I could.

Fortran at 15?

My mom was learning Cobol and Fortran, in 1983 when I was 13, and I definitely remember Fortran not being easy. Nor was Pascal, Cobol, etc.

BASIC was easy and my friend even wrote a program in BASIC on his Apple IIe to help his dad's business partner kee

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Oh, we're all just so impressed that you're such an uber-geek and so much more intelligent than anyone else here. You're so damned smart we'll all have to just fall on our knees and worship you. Why is it people here feel like they always have to prove they're smarter than everyone else on /.? Are they that insecure that they have to prove themselves?

The statement "Why is it people here feel like they always have to prove they're smarter than everyone else on /.?" is redundant. You should say it rather like this: "Why is it people on /. feel like they always have to prove they're smarter than everyon

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Because it doesn't have "Visual" in front of it. I think you will find the point-and-click functionality is a bit limited...

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It takes a perverted mind to take that as Microsoft bashing... VB.NET is still very recognizably a BASIC dialect, even if it is far removed from the original roots; but hey, QBasic was a long way there already, if you consider the fact that in the original

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Shields down, please. It wasn't an implied insult. VB.NET still uses BASIC. What does the "B" in "VB" mean, anyway?

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Hm? VB6 was a great success in its day, and VB.NET is doing surprisingly well even now.

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Well, consider this was 1964, it might have been a computed goto ...

In any case, this was not a language intended for software developers (like Algol). Nor was it a language intended for scientists (like Fortran). It was intended for CS students. Goto