BASIC is 50 years old!

[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.