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On This Date in 1964, the First BASIC Program
Posted by
timothy
on Thu May 01, 2008 12:39 PM
from the if-$date->=-2008-then-goto-past dept.
from the if-$date->=-2008-then-goto-past dept.
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."
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HELLO WORLD (Score:5, Funny)
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
And it is still running to this day.
3583 bytes free (Score:2)
BBC Basic! (Score:2, Interesting)
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 opinion. But then again, thats Basic for you.
Can you really call VB "BASIC"? (Score:2)
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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 part of the language. Of course, we didn't call it "refactoring" back then, we called it "cleaning up this goddam spaghetti."
Thank you, bitsavers! (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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... (Score:2)
I first used it because I couldn't find any other decent interpreters for an ancient Palm, then discovered it supported just about every platform I regularly use (oddly enough, however, no official Mac build exists, though I'd imagine you could get the Linux version to build on OS X).
And now
Dartmouth BASIC (Score:4, Informative)
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_ (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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
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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Breakfast was a bit of a disaster, this morning, I'm afraid to say. There is an
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Dialup via a 110-baud acoustic coupler on an ASR-33 teletype - now *that's* "old school"!
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Fortran at 15? (Score:2)
BASIC was easy and my friend even wrote a program in BASIC on his Apple IIe to help his dad's business partner keep inventory. I used it to...ummmm...do very interesting things with a Hayes SmartModem and BASIC.
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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 everyone else?"
There, that's better.
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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 is desirable for demonstrating simple models of computation.
Dartmouth Basic had if/then, gosub, and for/next loops, which were much less gawdawful than Fortran's Do loops. It had fewer than a dozen functions, but they were well chosen to give students th