video on the birth of BASIC

[toml_12953]

(02-27-2019 11:35 PM)Don Shepherd Wrote:  Interestingly, the very first version of Dartmouth BASIC lacked the one command that would be absolutely necessary for a truly interactive application: the INPUT statement. That statement was added by 1965.

READ and DATA were all that were needed for the language as envisioned originally. BASIC wasn't designed to be conversational. The focus was on quick turnaround time. FORTRAN and ALGOL didn't have INPUT at the time so no one thought that BASIC would need it. The book, Back to BASIC by Kemeny and Kurtz is a great insider history of the development of BASIC and a description of a modern BASIC. Parts of it seem like a very long ad for TrueBASIC which Kurtz helped develop. I used to be able to find a PDF of it online but I don't see it now.