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Dartmouth BASIC

In the 1960s Dartmouth BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language was designed and implemented at Dartmouth College by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. Over time BASIC became a popular language for home users, and business use. It introduced many people to programming as a hobby or career.

Dartmouth BASIC was the original BASIC language. It was designed for quick and easy programming by students and beginners using Dartmouth's experimental time-sharing system. It was one of the first programming languages intended to be used interactively. Unlike most later BASIC dialects, Dartmouth BASIC was compiled.

Several versions were produced over the years, all implemented as compilers by undergraduate teams working under the direction of the designers. The very first version was produced before the time-sharing system was ready. Known as CardBASIC, it was intended for the standard card-reader based batch processing system. The first interactive version was made available to general users in June, 1964; the second in October, 1964; the third in 1966; the fourth in 1969; the fifth in 1970; the sixth in 1971; and the seventh in 1979.

BASIC

During the 1970s, BASIC was the principal programming language taught to students, and continues to be a popular choice among educators. Despite its simplicity, BASIC is used for a wide variety of business applications. There is an ANSI standard for the BASIC language, but most versions of BASIC include many proprietary extensions. Microsoft's popular Visual Basic, for example, adds many object-oriented features to the standard BASIC.

Recently, many variations of BASIC have appeared as programming, or macro, languages within applications. For example, Microsoft Word and Excel both come with a version of BASIC with which users can write programs to customize and automate these applications.

Links

Dartmouth Alumni Magazine - http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/history/TBasic/ - True Basic - A sketch of John Kemeny for the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine - Nardi Reeder Campion - December 13, 2001.

FOLDOC - Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing - http://foldoc.org/foldoc.cgi?Dartmouth+BASIC - Dartmouth BASIC.

Webopedia - http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/B/BASIC.html - BASIC .

Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_BASIC - Dartmouth BASIC.

Developed by Peter Hale, 2006. The University of the West of England, Bristol, UK.