BASIC is 50 years old!

[Don Shepherd]

May 1 is the 50th anniversary of our favorite programming language. Well, maybe not everyone's favorite, but for many of us it was our first exposure to what a computer can do. Teletypes, time-sharing, GOTO, ah what great memories.

Dartmouth College, where it all started, has a celebration planned.

BASIC@50

[Katie Wasserman]

Nice video, thanks for the link!

It's interesting that they state May 1 at 4:00 am as the birth of BASIC. Being a night owl has always been an advantage to me in getting stuff done on computers. Back in the day of timesharing systems it was an obvious help, nowadays you get better bandwidth on most internet links.

[Don Shepherd]

I see that the IBM/360 and the Beatles arrival in the United States are also 50 years old. Those were the glory days. What will people be taking note of on the 50th anniversary of 2014? Airliners becoming lost? The "good old days" really were the good old days.

[Eddie W. Shore]

John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz are two new heroes of mine! I wish I could go to the events.

Don, I hope you don't mind but I am going to share the link to the web page on my Twitter, Google+, and Facebook page.

[Don Shepherd]

(04-10-2014 01:33 PM)Eddie W. Shore Wrote:  John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz are two new heroes of mine! I wish I could go to the events.

Don, I hope you don't mind but I am going to share the link to the web page on my Twitter, Google+, and Facebook page.

Sure, Eddie, that's fine. I got the link from the guy at Dartmouth who organized the 50th anniversary thing.

John Kemeny, who after co-inventing BASIC went on to be president of Dartmouth, died a few years ago. But Tom Kurtz is still among the living and resides near Dartmouth.

I would like to attend also, but I have teaching obligations. The documentary video will probably be available on their website after the event, according to the guy who organized everything.

I have always really appreciated the design principles that went into BASIC. Those principles were meant to keep it simple for the new user and those who could benefit from a knowledge of computer programming but were not geeks or engineers.

I keep looking on Ebay for an old ASR-33 teletype that I could turn into a BASIC timesharing station again. Maybe one day.

[HP67]

Thanks, Don. I used BASIC years and years ago too, but I can't remember the first box I used it on. Later I do remembering using several Radio Shack computers but I have the sense I used BASIC on something bigger earlier. Anyway, good stuff.

There are plenty of ASR-33s around, but magnitudes more have been trashed or "recycled" because they're so heavy and hard to move or ship. Rather than ebay, I would suggest subscribing to vintage computer boards and mailing lists and also seeking out recyclers in your area. Also check out hamfests and computer swapmeets. You will likely get one for free or for a song.

[Don Shepherd]

(04-10-2014 03:38 PM)HP67 Wrote:  Thanks, Don. I used BASIC years and years ago too, but I can't remember the first box I used it on. Later I do remembering using several Radio Shack computers but I have the sense I used BASIC on something bigger earlier. Anyway, good stuff.

There are plenty of ASR-33s around, but magnitudes more have been trashed or "recycled" because they're so heavy and hard to move or ship. Rather than ebay, I would suggest subscribing to vintage computer boards and mailing lists and also seeking out recyclers in your area. Also check out hamfests and computer swapmeets. You will likely get one for free or for a song.

HP67, I've seen a few come up on Ebay over the years but, as you said, they are heavy and rare and most have some issues. Mechanically, I can fix most things around the house, but repairing a 50-year-old teletype is not in my skill set. Now, if I could find a NIB ASR-33 that's been sitting in a warehouse lost for 50 years, free to a good home ....

[Alvaro]

I am very happy that BASIC once iluminated the Humanity.
It is the most versatil, all purpouse, programing language for "Home users"!
There is nothing better than that for end-users.

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

Quote:I keep looking on Ebay for an old ASR-33 teletype that I could turn into a BASIC timesharing station again.

Don,

You might want to try the Vintage Computer Forums. Check out "Vintage Computer Items Wanted" on the following page:

Vintage Comuter Forums

Of course, even if you got one given to you, the shipping would be very high unless you could pick it up.

Bill

[Egan Ford]

(04-10-2014 01:33 PM)Eddie W. Shore Wrote:  John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz are two new heroes of mine! I wish I could go to the events.

Tom Kurtz was one of the keynote speakers at VCF East in 2012 (IIRC)--It was an excellent two hour presentation. And, he gave all of us a reproduction of the original BASIC manual.

Last year I contacted him because I was curious as to the origin of the term "OLD". OLD is used to load an existing (or old) program into memory.

None of the BASIC's I learned in the '80s used that term. I first encountered it when playing around with a TI99 (last year). I later saw it used in the movie, "Colossus The Forbin Project". This 1970 movie predates the TI. CDC provided the computers. I found a CDC BASIC manual that also used "OLD" for load.

Anyway, I emailed Tom and asked him directly and got this reply:

Quote:John Kemeny and I wanted to get away from the computer jargon, even as it existed in 1963-64.
For example, login and logout. Off hand, I don't recall other terms, but the jargon seemed to have been
invented to make computing seem mysterious, and its pursuers, geniuses.

We wanted to have our computer commands be ordinary words that everyone would understand,
even first time users without benefit of a course. Thus, HELLO and GOODBYE, or BYE.
If one wanted to create a new program, what better command than NEW. Otherwise, if the
program already existed in ones directory, OLD seemed better than any other descriptor.
LIST and RUN followed more or less naturally. Some of the others -- well, to list all the files
in your personal directory, we settled on CATALOG.

BASIC was, and still is in my estimation, the only computer language designed for use by
non-specialists. E.g., a number is a number ... What difference does it make to the casual
usual that, internally, integers yield fast arithmetic that floating point numbers. (Furthermore,
it is the most unusual program where such a difference might be important -- in no program
I ever wrote in my life would it have made the slightest difference. In fact, the opposite
may be true, if one counts program development time in addition to computer run time.)

As far as I can recall, we did not borrow ANY of the commands from "older" languages.

A long answer to a short question.

Regards,

Tom

BTW, BASIC at Dartmouth saw "the light of day" on May 1, 1964. It was made available to
all faculty in June of 1964, and to several nearby high schools in September, 1964.

[Don Shepherd]

(04-10-2014 10:27 PM)Egan Ford Wrote:  

(04-10-2014 01:33 PM)Eddie W. Shore Wrote:  John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz are two new heroes of mine! I wish I could go to the events.

Tom Kurtz was one of the keynote speakers at VCF East in 2012 (IIRC)--It was an excellent two hour presentation. And, he gave all of us a reproduction of the original BASIC manual.

Last year I contacted him because I was curious as to the origin of the term "OLD". OLD is used to load an existing (or old) program into memory.

None of the BASIC's I learned in the '80s used that term. I first encountered it when playing around with a TI99 (last year). I later saw it used in the movie, "Colossus The Forbin Project". This 1970 movie predates the TI. CDC provided the computers. I found a CDC BASIC manual that also used "OLD" for load.

Anyway, I emailed Tom and asked him directly and got this reply:

Quote:John Kemeny and I wanted to get away from the computer jargon, even as it existed in 1963-64.
For example, login and logout. Off hand, I don't recall other terms, but the jargon seemed to have been
invented to make computing seem mysterious, and its pursuers, geniuses.

We wanted to have our computer commands be ordinary words that everyone would understand,
even first time users without benefit of a course. Thus, HELLO and GOODBYE, or BYE.
If one wanted to create a new program, what better command than NEW. Otherwise, if the
program already existed in ones directory, OLD seemed better than any other descriptor.
LIST and RUN followed more or less naturally. Some of the others -- well, to list all the files
in your personal directory, we settled on CATALOG.

BASIC was, and still is in my estimation, the only computer language designed for use by
non-specialists. E.g., a number is a number ... What difference does it make to the casual
usual that, internally, integers yield fast arithmetic that floating point numbers. (Furthermore,
it is the most unusual program where such a difference might be important -- in no program
I ever wrote in my life would it have made the slightest difference. In fact, the opposite
may be true, if one counts program development time in addition to computer run time.)

As far as I can recall, we did not borrow ANY of the commands from "older" languages.

A long answer to a short question.

Regards,

Tom

BTW, BASIC at Dartmouth saw "the light of day" on May 1, 1964. It was made available to
all faculty in June of 1964, and to several nearby high schools in September, 1964.

Thanks for that email, Egan. What a novel idea, using words that people already know instead of making up new ones. Do we really need "selfie"?

[Thomas Klemm]

(04-10-2014 11:11 PM)Don Shepherd Wrote:  Do we really need "selfie"?

We made selfies before it was cool:


Cheers
Thomas

[Katie Wasserman]

Quote:None of the BASIC's I learned in the '80s used that term. I first encountered it when playing around with a TI99 (last year). I later saw it used in the movie, "Colossus The Forbin Project". This 1970 movie predates the TI. CDC provided the computers. I found a CDC BASIC manual that also used "OLD" for load.

I used TOPS-20 BASIC (actually, BASIC-PLUS-2) in the early 80's and it had the OLD command. I think that other variants of DEC BASIC also had the OLD command too. (I should probably remember this better as I taught intro programming courses in BASIC running on DEC machines.)

[Don Shepherd]

(04-10-2014 10:27 PM)Egan Ford Wrote:  

(04-10-2014 01:33 PM)Eddie W. Shore Wrote:  John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz are two new heroes of mine! I wish I could go to the events.

Tom Kurtz was one of the keynote speakers at VCF East in 2012 (IIRC)--It was an excellent two hour presentation. And, he gave all of us a reproduction of the original BASIC manual.

Last year I contacted him because I was curious as to the origin of the term "OLD". OLD is used to load an existing (or old) program into memory.

None of the BASIC's I learned in the '80s used that term. I first encountered it when playing around with a TI99 (last year). I later saw it used in the movie, "Colossus The Forbin Project". This 1970 movie predates the TI. CDC provided the computers. I found a CDC BASIC manual that also used "OLD" for load.

Anyway, I emailed Tom and asked him directly and got this reply:

Quote:John Kemeny and I wanted to get away from the computer jargon, even as it existed in 1963-64.
For example, login and logout. Off hand, I don't recall other terms, but the jargon seemed to have been
invented to make computing seem mysterious, and its pursuers, geniuses.

We wanted to have our computer commands be ordinary words that everyone would understand,
even first time users without benefit of a course. Thus, HELLO and GOODBYE, or BYE.
If one wanted to create a new program, what better command than NEW. Otherwise, if the
program already existed in ones directory, OLD seemed better than any other descriptor.
LIST and RUN followed more or less naturally. Some of the others -- well, to list all the files
in your personal directory, we settled on CATALOG.

BASIC was, and still is in my estimation, the only computer language designed for use by
non-specialists. E.g., a number is a number ... What difference does it make to the casual
usual that, internally, integers yield fast arithmetic that floating point numbers. (Furthermore,
it is the most unusual program where such a difference might be important -- in no program
I ever wrote in my life would it have made the slightest difference. In fact, the opposite
may be true, if one counts program development time in addition to computer run time.)

As far as I can recall, we did not borrow ANY of the commands from "older" languages.

A long answer to a short question.

Regards,

Tom

BTW, BASIC at Dartmouth saw "the light of day" on May 1, 1964. It was made available to
all faculty in June of 1964, and to several nearby high schools in September, 1964.

My first BASIC was HP 2000C Time-shared BASIC in 1972 at the University of Louisville, and I see from my reference card that OLD became GET and NEW became NAME.

[Marcus von Cube]

Quote:John Kemeny and I wanted to get away from the computer jargon, even as it We wanted to have our computer commands be ordinary words that everyone would understand,

The problem is that this works fine if English is your mother tongue. But what if not?

There were attempts to internationalize BASIC by MicroSoft: Some versions of MS-Office came with translated versions of VBA. It wasn't a great success, though.

Nowadays, programming isn't needed to operate a computer. When I turned on my first home computer in the 80s I was greeted with MEM? followed by READY and an angle bracket. No way of doing anything with this machine without at least some sense of programming. The least You needed to know was the name of the program to run and how to start it, or, even better, just code your own.

Compare this to smart phones and their users. There isn't even the need to know how to type in text or how to operate other input devices like mice or joy sticks. I don't want to start a discussion of what's "better". But I feel old sometimes.

[peacecalc]

Hey Marcus,

You and a lot of members (and of course me) we are old! Welcome to this association,
because the younger often do not know anything about RPN, Basic and so on...

Be honest to be somebody who knows a secret and ancient knowledge, "we are all magicians" (@Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot).

Sincerely
peacecalc

[Don Shepherd]

(04-13-2014 09:57 AM)Marcus von Cube Wrote:  The problem is that this works fine if English is your mother tongue. But what if not?
...
Nowadays, programming isn't needed to operate a computer.
...
But I feel old sometimes.

I think that the inventors of BASIC were trying to address a very specific problem in 1963. They weren't concerned with inventing an international programming language. They recognized that colleges and universities would produce the future leaders, managers, and CEOs of major industries and government agencies, and they thought these people should have some exposure to the power of the computer. The future leaders of industry were thought to be mainly liberal arts students, and existing programming languages at that time (FORTRAN and COBOL) were considered too technical for those students to grasp. So BASIC was born.

(Given the current rotten state of government and politics, especially in the US, perhaps a course in "how to be responsible and have integrity" might have been a better choice than learning BASIC.)

BASIC grew beyond that original limited purpose because it was small and simple and easily ported to other minicomputers and, of course, microcomputers.

Yes, many of us are old, in fact. But that's ok, it's the natural order of things.

[Les Bell]

(04-13-2014 09:57 AM)Marcus von Cube Wrote:  The problem is that this works fine if English is your mother tongue. But what if not?

I remember seeing an IBM 5100 at a trade show in Paris around 1976, that had all the BASIC keywords translated into French - "IMPRIME" instead of "PRINT", and so on. No doubt the Académie Française had a hand in that, but IBM may well have supported other languages as well.

[Massimo Gnerucci]

(04-14-2014 01:30 AM)Les Bell Wrote:  

(04-13-2014 09:57 AM)Marcus von Cube Wrote:  The problem is that this works fine if English is your mother tongue. But what if not?

I remember seeing an IBM 5100 at a trade show in Paris around 1976, that had all the BASIC keywords translated into French - "IMPRIME" instead of "PRINT", and so on. No doubt the Académie Française had a hand in that, but IBM may well have supported other languages as well.

I know of a COBOL mainframe implementation in french, too.

[Alvaro]

BASIC is surely a good Programing language, specialy if you need to do a "quick" simple task.
But complete and powerful enough to full fill the most needs of end-users.
I am questioning myself why we don´t have it in every programable device today? Why is BASIC nearly gone.
Instead, seems that "everyone" around did cook their own soup at their flavour.
But at the end, people are facing , here and there, the one way or the other, with difficulties and this do indeed prevents end-user to work.
With BASIC around, the life of people would be much more easier and , younger people would have a good start up in Computer Programing World.