These changes made the language much less idiosyncratic while still having an overall structure and feel similar to the original FORTRAN. Likewise, the cryptic IF statement of Fortran, whose syntax matched a particular instruction of the machine on which it was originally written, became the simpler IF I=5 THEN GOTO 100. For instance, the difficult to remember DO loop was replaced by the much easier to remember FOR I = 1 TO 10 STEP 2, and the line number used in the DO was instead indicated by the NEXT I. However, the syntax was changed wherever it could be improved. The new language was heavily patterned on FORTRAN II statements were one-to-a-line, numbers were used to indicate the target of loops and branches, and many of the commands were similar or identical to Fortran. The acronym BASIC comes from the name of an unpublished paper by Thomas Kurtz. This led to increasing interest in a system using time-sharing and a new language specifically for use by non-STEM students. Small programs would return results in a few seconds. While Kurtz was visiting MIT, John McCarthy suggested that time-sharing offered a solution a single machine could divide up its processing time among many users, giving them the illusion of having a (slow) computer to themselves. Moreover, the lack of any sort of immediate feedback was a key problem the machines of the era used batch processing and took a long time to complete a run of a program. Is it '1, 10, 2' or '1, 2, 10', and is the comma after the line number required or not?" As Kurtz noted, Fortran had numerous oddly-formed commands, notably an "almost impossible-to-memorize convention for specifying a loop: 'DO 100, I = 1, 10, 2'. New experiments using Fortran and ALGOL followed, but Kurtz concluded these languages were too tricky for what they desired. These did not progress past a single freshman class. Kemeny and Kurtz had made two previous experiments with simplified languages, DARSIMCO (Dartmouth Simplified Code) and DOPE (Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment). Kemeny later noted that "Our vision was that every student on campus should have access to a computer, and any faculty member should be able to use a computer in the classroom whenever appropriate. Kurtz had joined the department in 1956, and from the 1960s Kemeny and Kurtz agreed on the need for programming literacy among students outside the traditional STEM fields. Sloan Foundation award for $500,000 to build a new department building. Based largely on his reputation as an innovator in math teaching, in 1959 the school won an Alfred P. Kemeny was the math department chairman at Dartmouth College. This reignited use of the language and "VB" remains a major programming language in the form of VB.NET. In 1991, Microsoft released Visual Basic, combining a greatly updated version of BASIC with a visual forms builder.
These machines almost always had a BASIC interpreter installed by default, often in the machine's firmware or sometimes on a ROM cartridge.īASIC fell from use in the early 1990s, as newer machines with far greater capabilities came to market and other programming languages (such as Pascal and C) became tenable. BASIC was available for almost any system of the era, and naturally became the de facto programming language for the home computer systems that emerged in the late 1970s. Due to the tiny main memory available on these machines, often 4 kB, a variety of Tiny BASIC dialects was also created. The emergence of early microcomputers in the mid-1970s led to the development of a number of BASIC dialects, including Microsoft BASIC in 1975. Many early video games trace their history to one of these versions of BASIC.
Chipmunk basic programming language series#
Hewlett-Packard produced an entire computer line for this method of operation, introducing the HP2000 series in the late 1960s and continuing sales into the 1980s. This general model became very popular on minicomputer systems like the PDP-11 and Data General Nova in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In addition to the language itself, Kemeny and Kurtz developed the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS), which allowed multiple users to edit and run BASIC programs at the same time. At the time, nearly all use of computers required writing custom software, which was something only scientists and mathematicians tended to learn. They wanted to enable students in fields other than science and mathematics to use computers. Kurtz and released at Dartmouth College in 1964. The original version was designed by John G. BASIC ( Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use.
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