Two Dartmouth College mathematicians introduced BASIC on May 1, 1964 as a way to introduce computer programming to non-specialists. “Computer science” at the time was essentially a branch of mathematics, and the most widespread computer programming language at the time was FORTRAN (short for FORmula TRANslation). BASIC, on the other hand, was aimed at getting non-mathematicians interested in programming, and the name (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) steered away from the scary mention of formulas inherit in FORTRAN.
In structure, however, FORTRAN and BASIC are quite similar. The big difference, and the reason BASIC was a critical part of the rise of microcomputers, was that BASIC was an interpreted language.
Virtually every other computer language at the time was compiled. A programmer wrote a program as a complete set of instructions, which were then fed into another program called a compiler. The compiler built a machine language program from the FORTRAN instructions. If you made even the tiniest change to the program, the compiler had to build the program again from scratch. Compilers traditionally compiled a batch of programs at scheduled times. Virtually all compilers in the early days ran on mainframe computers, shared by dozens or hundreds of programmers and users, and and a programmer might have to wait hours or days to see the results of their program — assuming it didn’t end in an error.
BASIC, on the other hand, was “interpreted” one command at a time, and soon came to be strongly associated with microcomputers. As most microcomputers were used by a single user at one time, a programmer could build a program in small pieces, test them, and get back immediate results. Errors could be corrected while the programmer was still thinking about the problem, rather than having to wait for days to see results and then try and remember what they were trying to do.
From a technical standpoint, since a compiler created a machine language program, compiled programs were far faster than interpreted programs. But from a practical standpoint, developing programs with an interpreter, and getting immediate feedback, made the programming process much faster.
Early computers, such as the Radio Shack TRS-80, Commodore PET, and Apple II, did not come with applications. If you wanted to play a game, you had to write one. I wrote my first word processor on a TRS-80 (none existed at the time), and my first database program, and several years later, my first web server. In each case, I replaced the word processor, database program, and web server with a professionally written version, once one was available. But in the early days of personal computers, writing your own programs was the rule, rather than the exception.
BASIC’s two inventors, John G. Kemeny (1926-1992) and Thomas E. Kurtz, are known for many things besides BASIC. Kemeny worked as Albert Einstein’s mathematical assistant while in grad school, and became a full professor of mathematics at Dartmouth at 27. He became Dartmouth’s 13th president in 1970, serving until 1981.
Thomas E. Kurtz (1928- ) joined the Dartmouth mathematics department in 1956, and he went on to head several successive academic computing centers at Dartmouth. He is the author or coauthor of a dozen books on statistics and computer programming, and one of the earliest proponents of using computers in interdisciplinary endeavors.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen, two undergraduates at Harvard, created a microcomputer-based BASIC interpreter in 1975, and went on to found Microsoft. The TRS-80, Apple II, and IBM PC all used Microsoft BASIC, and launched the microcomputer revolution.
Thank you, Kemeny and Kurtz.
Yes, and thank you, Bill