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video on the birth of BASIC
02-27-2019, 11:35 PM
Post: #8
RE: video on the birth of BASIC
(02-26-2019 08:44 AM)ijabbott Wrote:  The first thing they used to do in university computing courses in the early 80s was to un-teach BASIC! Smile

Yes, many computer science people always disparaged Dartmouth BASIC, mostly because of its lack of structures, but remember BASIC was designed for the liberal arts students, most of whom would never become programmers. Kemeny and Kurtz realized that the liberal arts students would become the business managers of tomorrow, and they would really benefit by an exposure to simple computer programming that anyone could understand. And their future businesses would benefit from their knowledge of that. And I think that goal was achieved.

BASIC proliferated on almost all of the early small computers because it was so small itself. It even made it to IBM mainframes, although I doubt if the IBM programmers used it very much.

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.

I still love BASIC although my programming career included only FORTRAN and COBOL.

I could never warm up to a programming language named after a snake.
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Messages In This Thread
video on the birth of BASIC - Don Shepherd - 02-25-2019, 03:50 PM
RE: video on the birth of BASIC - ijabbott - 02-26-2019, 08:44 AM
RE: video on the birth of BASIC - Don Shepherd - 02-27-2019 11:35 PM
RE: video on the birth of BASIC - ijabbott - 02-28-2019, 12:01 AM
RE: video on the birth of BASIC - KeithB - 02-26-2019, 04:30 PM
RE: video on the birth of BASIC - Namir - 02-26-2019, 12:38 PM
RE: video on the birth of BASIC - BruceH - 02-28-2019, 09:00 PM



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