Basic hits 40
Four decades ago, two Dartmouth College professors made computing history
Computerworld - Forty years ago, at 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, two Dartmouth College professors -- with the help of two of their undergraduate students -- made computing history.
While the professors, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz slept, the students successfully ran two simple Basic programs on two separate teletype terminals located in the basement of College Hall.
Kemeny, who later became president of Dartmouth and died in 1992, and Kurtz were the authors of Basic, which Kurtz said went on to be the most widely used computer language in the world.
Kurtz, who is now retired, talked about Basic, originally an acronym for Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, in a telephone interview this week from his Hanover, N.H., home.
Basic ran on the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, a network of multiple simple terminals connected to a large computer, Kurtz explained. "The development of Basic was a natural step in a whole progression of computer activities that began when I arrived at Dartmouth in 1956," he said. "The whole thrust was to try to make computing easier for people, particularly nonscience and nonengineering people."
Around 1960 or so, Kurtz said, he and Kemeny realized that the only way to do that was to develop a time-sharing system that would be especially geared toward small student jobs rather than the "big research stuff."
"The idea was that a time-sharing system made it easy for students or anybody else to get to the computer," Kurtz said. "The user interface to the time-sharing system was very simple. Instead of using things like 'log in' and 'log out,' we used [simple English-language functions] like 'hello' and 'goodbye.'
"We needed a simple language, and that's how Basic got developed," he said. "The languages that were around in those days were just not suitable, so we had to develop one from scratch -- [though] it derived from the existing languages, there's no question about that -- and we also wanted a computing environment where people could use it without having to take a course."
Basic was based on Fortran and Algol and was first implemented on a General Electric 225 mainframe, which supported multiple terminals. When it was introduced, Basic was a compiled language that used common-sense commands like LIST, SAVE, RUN, END and PRINT.
"The whole business just exploded," Kurtz said. "Everybody started using it, and it drew a lot of attention from around the country. The whole thing grew just enormously fast -- far beyond anything we'd ever expected."
Kurtz said the companies that first


- Excel 2010 Cheat Sheet
- Register for this Computerworld Insider Cheat Sheet and gain access to hundreds of premium content articles, guides, product reviews and more.
- Workload Automation Challenges and Opportunities
- This Executive Brief discusses IDC's perspective on how enterprise workload management requirements are changing and highlights the ways that workload automation solutions can...
- Protecting Against Database Attacks and Insider Threats: Top 5 Scenarios
- Read this new eBook to learn the top five scenarios and essential best practices for preventing database attacks and insider threats.
- Database Activity Monitoring Is Evolving
- Read the analyst report and learn how you can leverage the core capabilities of a DAP solution for better database security.
- Establishing a Strategy for Database Security is No Longer Optional
- The options for securing increasingly valuable databases are very broad and deep, and can be confusing. This research provides an overview of three...
- Thinking Outside The Data Warehouse
- This high level, business problem focused eBook uses 5 customer scenarios to show how people and organizations are tackling real issues using IBM... All App Development White Papers
- Distributed Database Security with Real-time Monitoring
- View this demo and learn how IBM InfoSphere Guardium database activity monitoring can help protect your sensitive data in distributed DBMS environments with...
- InfoSphere Warehouse Packs Demo
- These flash modules make warehousing more tangible and relevant to business users through detailed explanations of the InfoSphere Warehouse Packs.
- Seven Deadly Sins of Cloud Security (Video)
- As cloud computing gains popularity, too few people are aware of the security threats that are emerging. In this short video, experts from...
- Delivery Management -- Extending Lifecycle Management
- Date: Wednesday, June 20, 2012, 1:00 PM EDT
Siloed organizations continue doing the wrong things and doing things wrong, leading to increased costs,... - Leverage automation today to reduce IT complexity
- Date: Tuesday, June 5, 2012, 2:00 PM EDT
Whether your B2B complexity is caused by multiple technologies due to M&A, business or application specific...
All App Development Webcasts