While I usually pride myself on my high technological ability among my peers, thanks in no small part to the start of my education being based in Computer Engineering, I admit that time has waned my familiarity and skill on this front, particularly in the realm of things like coding. There was a time when I could easily code in the C++, Javascript, and Visual BASIC languages, but find that now my abilities are lesser than they were. This extends to my knowledge about the languages themselves, and how they relate to computers on a hardware level; ironically, the history and impact of these languages has escaped me. As such, the beginnings of consumer code in the form of BASIC has intrigued me to the point of further research.
BASIC, or Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, was, as the name implies, a high-level coding language. A high-level language is one that is closer to human language (in this case, English) than to what computers actually speak in, which is to say binary and derivative forms thereof. BASIC was developed and released by math professors John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1964, meant to be used on the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, and to be approachable for the new, learning computer scientists of the day. The DTSS was Dartmouth College’s operating system that was used on their computers when BASIC was developed. BASIC quickly became a learner’s language that could be run on the newly emerging personal and home computers of the 1970s and 1980s, such as the Apple IIe and much of Hewlitt-Packard’s (today is known popularly as HP) early consumer line. This popularity came from both the simplicity of the language and the small file sizes that the language created and used. These purpose-built origins of BASIC are reminiscent of the beginning components of the Internet, such as ARPAnet and Tim Berners Lee’s work at CERN, with the utility of each of these later becoming more accessible and useful to a wider public. This exploding out was not planned by the creators of any of these, particularly Kurtz, who said later in an article by TIME that he and Kemeny were only “thinking only of Dartmouth,” and its application as a learning tool.
The language got spun into many variations to be used more widely than in the realms of academia or hobbyist computing. The previously mentioned article even points out that a fledgling Microsoft got its start by developing different purpose-built versions of BASIC to be used for other applications, such as Visual BASIC. The article continues on to track the spiderwebbing of BASIC throughout the world of computing, leading the development of new languages, new hardware, and programs galore. The decidedly less usual pursuits of the language are even explored deeper in the article, bringing up the development of games despite non-graphical representation, such as slot machines made in ASCII-esque art, before eventually turning into the more advanced versions and iterations of BASIC that included things like graphics and pictures as well as text. These spiraling advancements also expanded far beyond the walls of Dartmouth, spreading across the United States and further across the world to influence computing as a whole.
Sources (* = primary, - = secondary): -Encyclopædia Britannica - The BASIC Computer Language https://www.britannica.com/technology/BASIC -Encyclopædia Britannica - Early Computing and SQL https://www.britannica.com/technology/computer-programming-language/SQL#ref134617 -TIME Magazine - Fifty Years of BASIC https://time.com/69316/basic/ *The original user manual for BASIC distributed by Kemeny and Kurtz http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dartmouth/BASIC_Oct64.pdf
