I programmed in BASIC for the first time in 1981 when I was 9 years old on a TI/99 4A that my parents sacrificed a lot of money to purchase for me. They saw the future that I didn’t yet have the ability to see. Since then I have had a great career working for Boeing, NASA, and a variety of other great places. I owe it all to BASIC and the introduction to computing in general. These early pioneers were true geniuses.
@@WalterBurton Same here, and in addition to Compute! magazine there was Byte magazine. My brother and I would take turns, one of us reading out the program code and the other typing it into the TI-99/4A. We wrote several of our own games and other programs, as well as entering them from the magazines.
Isn't it a true crime that M$ knifed, stole, & railroaded technology in it's infancy. I fully believe that had that NOT happened, we would have a MUCH better technological world than we now have. MUCH better.
Interesting... 15 years after that, I discovered BASIC at the age of 11, but I didn't know how to get an interpreter for my home PC. So I bought a TI99/4A from a thrift shop and did exactly the same thing
Me too. BASIC may be "looked down" on nowadays but I'm sure an awful lot of programmers made their first efforts in programming with some version of BASIC. My brother bought a ZX81 in the early 80's. I was 11-12ísh at the time. I figured a lot out on my own but he taught me when I asked for help. Later the Acorn BBC, gwBasic came by . Later PASCAl entered my life (in my opinion way underestimated) but I owe a lot to BASIC, for sure. I never really got a carreer out of it but hobby programming did teach me to divide big problems into several small problems. I work in education and this helps me a lot with assisting students.
I'm from Brazil, and I learned BASIC language in 1980 with a TK-82C running a Z80 microprocessor. It was the begging of a love story with computers for all my life. So I feel myself a member of the Dartmouth computer community.🙌
I remember as a kid, copying games in BASIC out of magazines to run on my computer. After a while, you started figuring out the commands were and how the syntax was layed out. After a while, my friends and I were making our own "basic" games. I think in the 80's it was every kid's entry point in to computing.
@@patriotdoc1776 I actually think the way those computers from the late 70s-mid 80s were with the basic and the cassette tapes, made computer programming a lot more accessible to kids than it is now, despite computer devices being literally everywhere.
Right? He fundamentally changed the lives of so many people, and he could even see it coming. My mother learned programming on Basic, went on to design shuttle software for NASA. She taught me coding at age 5, and now I'm using that to teach and automate/innovate/inspire high school students to earn scholarships through using technology with human care to help dramatically improve SAT scores. Inspiring people to see what they are capable of through making it simple is an amazingly powerful thing. ❤️
Wow! What a story, I really enjoyed it. I did a BASIC course at the Australian National University in 1975, been messing with computers ever since - I am now 81 years old and still doing it.
An actual course would've helped me out as a kid a lot. My friends and I learned from code in magazines and then experimenting on our own. Learning good habits and techniques probably would've been a big plus. You learn hard habits to break that cross-over languages.
Good grief! That's some stamina you've got, Fred; i was a programmer at Marconi Co Ltd in 1965 (aged 16), i enjoyed it then (and loved Algol-60), but by age 21 it had started to become more of a chore than a pleasure, and i was so happy at age 26 when i got my PhD because it meant i wouldn't have to program any more - i could get other people to do it for me! 😊
I was 15 when I started programming with Basic in september 1980, thanks to a priest who paid half the cost of 6 PET Commodore computers because the school would not pay for it. I am forever grateful to this man for sharing so generously his passion for programming. Thanks Gilles Marceau for changing many lives.
My father taught me in 1977 on his first PET to write BASIC. I ended up sitting in front of the computer until 3 or 4 a.m. and he got really angry. I was 12 or 13 back then.
@@GerritSchulze Lucky you ! I I had to go home ( from school ) at 10 pm because that generous priest I was talking about made sure no one was there too late. The best time of my life...
@Peter Alexander Basic isn't dead, and is alive and well to this day. Microsoft Office uses VBA (Visual Basic for Application) as its programming language, which retains much of the original syntax: For Next, If Then Else, etc. It still works even if you use line numbers like in the old days: e.g. 100 If x y Then Goto 200
I learned BASIC when I built my first computer, an Altair, in 1975. I went on to have a 16 year career at the phone company as an analyst/software engineer. I wrote almost everything in BASIC. Thanks guys, you made this highschool graduate's career possible.
I was a "Kiewit Systems Programmer" from 1968 till 1971. We were all undergraduates, most of us with no computer experience when we came to Dartmouth. Thanks to Professor Kemeny, we got an incredible education in computing, and we got paid! Professor Kemeny was a visionary, an incredible leader. He was also a teacher to the core. The choice to depend on inexperienced undergraduates to invent what was, for that time, a cutting edge system, took courage. I believe that Professor Kemeny made that choice to give us a learning opportunity we could not have gotten in a classroom. Several of the speakers in this video had returned to campus while I was there, and were also great teachers and mentors. I can not begin to express my gratitude for the opportunity Professor Kemeny and Dartmouth gave me.
@@archlab007 Sorry, don't know him, but I've told this story (often will a few more words!) many times. I'm always happy to repeat it. Dartmouth, and Kiewit, helped me find my path to a fulfilling and rewarding career.
John G. Kemeny (born Kemény János György) deserves way more recognition than the small page on Wikipedia there is about him now. To me he is one of the greatest of computer history because he had the vision that everyone needed to be able to understand and use a computer. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_G._Kemeny
As a Dartmouth student from 1968-1972, I had the opportunity to begin using BASIC as soon as I arrived on campus. As I recall, every single one of us freshmen were guided into Kiewit (the computer center), personally introduced to the DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing System), seated in front of a terminal and personally taught how to operate the terminal and get on the system. All of us = 800 or so freshmen. We all had the opportunity to learn to write BASIC even before our first classes were to begin. I learned to do so. Later on, during the winter term of my sophomore year, I took an introductory course in what I would label "survey research sociology" (Sociology 8), taught by Professor Jim Davis, a brilliant guy. During that course we were taught all sorts of ways of statistically analyzing data to create multi-variable causal models designed to provide insights into causes and/or correlates of political opinions, population growth rates, all sorts of things. We then composed our theories, sat at terminals and ran PROJECT IMPRESS, a unique timesharing program which analyzed data from various surveys. Thereafter we wrote papers touting our theories and justifying them through the use of PROJECT IMPRESS results. We thought nothing of using a full second or more of computer time. It was a remarkable era. Alas, I graduated, went to law school across the country at UCBerkeley and never knew what transpired thereafter. What a great major, great professors, great college and great time. I will forever miss it.
Jim Davis became the father of the "General Social Survey" which is a major biannual national survey of many things. It got adopted by the NSF and is a major social science resource that is used and updated to this day.
I learned BASIC on the TRS-80 in 1979 in Kirkland Washington, near Redmond where Microsoft has its main campus. It was my introduction to computers. In 1997 I started my first company in Seattle, an IT firm focusing on Security and Data Recovery. Today I am in Ukraine working on a couple of companies centered around the IT industry. Thank you Dartmouth. I did not know you were the daddy of BASIC.
I hope you and your family are safe if you’re still in the Ukraine. I also learned Basic on the TRaSh-80 CoCo that my dad got our family for Christmas of 1980. It had 16KB of RAM and a cassette recorder for storage and games. It also had a game port. I still have it and a few of the cassettes of programs I created. I was mainly interested in animation and because of the limited RAM you had to choose if you wanted more pages and colors but lower resolution or fewer pages and colors but higher resolution. To draw a circle you had to put in the grid coordinates, the radius, then you had an option to die a full circle or a partial circle, then you could fill the circle if you wanted, and of course you had to use Sin and Cos to plot the circle. I was designing cars, trying to recreate the light show from a Pink Floyd concert I had seen, dabbled with some of my favorite Sci-Fi series ships flying across the scene with 8-bit music I programmed in a subroutine. Now I go into Blender and I think about the hours of coding I did in Basic and I laugh at how easy the kids have it with Blender!
I hope he's still there and safe too. Even if he's out of there in the free world I'm very sure he's helping his country fellows to make all efforts to defeat the Russian bastard!!!
Character graphics! I wrote my first "game" in BASIC on a TRASH-80 in a school class. Tape backup and all. Around the same, my folks got me the first 128k Mac and I ended up writing raytracing software on the Mac II when it came out c1990. Yeah - realtime raytracing nowadays is insane. :) @@rwfrench66GenX
November 10, 1954 Specifications for The IBM Mathematical FORmula FORTRAN Basic is 90% Fortran, but it is Interpreter, perfect for small microcomputer L' équipe était libre d'action chez IBM Bonnes promenades
The thing I enjoyed most was that for Kemeny, it was having his students excel into the future. To be so free with your knowledge and desirous of the next generation to succeed is the definition of selflessness and greatness. Thank you Mr. Kemeny!
What a wonderful video. I was writing BASIC code on those teletype machines at the University of Louisville in 1972 and I loved it. That was the beginning of my career in programming. I am now retired, but I want to publicly thank Professors Kemeny and Kurtz and all of those who made BASIC possible.
I used teletypes and BASIC while in college. In 1974 I went to work for the US Census Bureau as a FORTRAN programmer on the Univac 1108. We punched our FORTRAN source code and runstream (Univac's job control language) onto IBM cards and used the 1108's strictly as batch machines. In a couple of years the bureau got some teletypes and we were able to share them and enter our code that way instead of cards, in what was called "demand" mode. In a couple more years each programming office (containing about 6 programmers) got one CRT terminal that we shared, and we entered our code and tested our programs via the CRT terminals. Each advance in technology was welcomed by us, it made our jobs easier.
I'm a programming lecturer today (since 2017), and it's hard to express when teaching how unbelievably smart these guys are/were. BASIC was the first programming language I worked with in the early 90s, and it was considered kind of old even then, but it made programming more accessible that it had ever been. I mainly teach C++ and C#, and I'm standing on the shoulders of giants in terms of how incredible the work these guys did to enable the work of programming for the average person was.
I taught myself basic in the mid 1970s on a Data General Nova that supported 16 users in 32k bytes of memory. That experience got me started on a career that lasted a until retirement last year. Thank you Dartmouth for starting it all.
I worked on DTSS - Dartmouth Time Sharing operating system - as an undergraduate from 1972 to 1976. John Kemeny was no longer involved day to day but many of the folks in this video were still involved. That time and that experience and the other folks I worked with provided me with a basis for a wonderful career. I took an advanced math course in probability and statistics taught by Kemeny. His teaching was excellent, he made the material come alive.
I took a class in BASIC in 1983 when my middle son, age 13, was learning it in school. We would write simple programs together on his computer. If the only thing it did for me was to bring my son and I together more -- no small feat with a teenage boy -- then it was worth it. He soon outpaced me. He went on to ITT and has had a very successful career because of his love for things technical, logical and mathematical. I really enjoyed this history video.
I started with BASIC on digital equipment 1978. Then did BASIC on Commodore, Apple and BASICA on IBM PC, then many variants, MS Visual Basic (they dropped BASIC as an acronym and made if Basic), then VB.Net. Finally gave it up with C#. Now I do python, PHP and still C#. THANK YOU Kemeny and Kurtz and Dartmouth college
In 1983, we purchased a Commodore 64. I had done some programming at uni in the 60's, but was too dirty a programmer to get much success when it took 3 weeks to get back an error statement "the flagged statement or the one before it has an error, perhaps a comma missing from a list" - still remember that mongrel message word for word after 56 years. With the 64 I and my then 7 year old son learned basic; it was a hobby for both of us, and brought us together. My son now designs PCBs. I am now retired, still build websites using .php; principles still the same, and I am still accused of talking gibberish when explaining technical matters by those who do not wish to learn. Still have to debug every idea I too quickly code. As NED said "such is life".
I too learned to program in BASIC on an 8K Commodore PET. I am now 83 years old and have been a Scratch user for the last 14 years. As students were eager to learn BASIC, they are just as eager to program in Scratch which now has (I think) around 50 million registered users most of which are youngsters. Thanks for this wonderful, historic video.
I enjoyed seeing you say you use Scratch. It's nice to know I'm not the only one who realizes it's not just a "kiddie" language (much like how LOGO was seen, back in the day).
I was born in 1972 and I learned BASIC in 1984 for the first time. I used a Commodore 64. Back in that year I was really the only one who was programming (I was a 'nerd' let's say). Still I knew that this was a very important thing. It was a pitty that the schools in Belgium were not yet ready for this.
If you bail when the closing credits roll, you will miss a heartfelt personal tribute to Kemeny (by I believe the filmmaker). Go back and listen - it’s worth it. 35:50
I really have to scratch my head and wonder why oh why? every time I watch an informative video on technical subjects which is laced with such obnoxious and irritating background music
So does everyone who works or has worked in the Electronics field. No more working to make a circuit with connections in bowls of mercury. I realize that wasn’t in the documentary, but it still holds true. Also, none of us made our own vacuum tubes for amplifiers.
A man named Mr. Anderson lit an eternal fire in me when he taught me how to program BASIC at a San Mateo high school where we had two ASR-33 teletypes connected to a remote HP-2000 computer. He taught a bunch of us even though he was already let go for preaching the value of computer education. The school heads disagreed, thought it was a waste of time, and gave him the pink slip. I wish I can find Mr. Anderson - the best teacher I ever had. He had given me a lifelong gift, an insatiable curiosity for computers, and a lucrative career. I loved that man dearly. Seems like John Kemeny was from the same mold.
I was teaching in a small rural school when we acquired our first Radio Shack TRS-80. Over the next couple of years I wrote a number of educational programs and games in BASIC for the kids to use, and I taught them to write their own. It was such a simple and effective computer language!
@Buddy Austin Schools got a discount from Apple, so my little school eventually acquired a couple of IIe computers and an Imagewriter printer. Then we got an "Apple for the teacher" grant and six IIc computers. Our staff didn't use them much, so using them as a base, I set them up in a spare classroom. I solicited several other IIe and IIc castoffs from the community and our computer lab was born!
I nagged and begged my mother, who was a self-employed translator and a single mother of three with two toddlers to supply for, for half a year back in 1981 when I was 10 years old to buy me a Sinclair ZX Spectrum (and later a Commodore C128) and she finally did. I used it to teach myself BASIC and coding during long nights in a darkened room, trying to be stealth and not making her aware of what I was doing, because I had to go to school the next day. Little did she know that her decision to buy me this computer which she could barely afford back then would define my entire professional career. She has passed, but I will be forever grateful for the sacrifices she made to enable me and my sisters to go on and have a good life.
In 1975 when I was 12 my Fathers company Ilford Films) bought a Honeywell Time Sharing system and trained a lot of the management in production control where he worked. He brought all the training materials home, and I taught myself BASIC and wrote some programs, which he would take to work and type in during his lunch hour and bring home the results, sometimes making minor corrections but he always made me work out what he had done first. Because of this I opted to do a computer studies course as my "O" level options, and ended up going to Exeter University )UK) to do a Computer Studies degree. I never realized at the time how new BASIC was, really, having been invented shortly after I was born. BASIC certainly transformed computing, making it accessable to millions of people who would otherwise probablly never had access to computers, or the time to learn enough to make use of them.
I owe massive thanks to Prof Kemeny for my career and livelihood. I learnt to program BASIC on the VIC 20 in the early 80s and have worked in programming all my adult life.
Me too. I started in 1975, a little bit after keyboards came out and programmers didn't have to flip front-panel switches and program in Assembler like they did on the IMSAI-8080. (Ghastly level of tedium!) My motivation was to test blackjack card-counting strategies and poker hands. Great fun. Led to a 38-year programming career. Still coding in QuickBasic 4.5 to test stock market technical analysis ideas. Developing and debugging small programs in a DOS Basic interpreter environment is soooooo much faster than using a compiler like VB.NET.
@@Leutchik While my first programs were hand-assembled and entered in hex onto a SC/MP evaluation board using a DEC terminal (I think the monitor ROM was KITBUG) I also clunked out a couple of programs on 8080 systems that were connected to ASR-33 Teletypes. I love those, by the way. Such a beautiful action.. As you depress the key without too much force, at some point in the key travel, you feel the electromechanicals take over and complete the action as well as hammer a letter onto the paper. Anyway, (started to reminisce there) I just wanted to add that 2 or 3 years later, I borrowed a workmate's Mini-Scamp (early Australian computer kit project from Electronics Australia magazine, designed by Dr John Kennewell in 1976 and beautified by Jim Rowe) and entered a tone-playing program along with numbers denoting note pitch and duration for Eric Clapton's guitar break in "Presence of the Lord" - all using toggle switches! :-))
In the 80's, I was lucky enough to cut my teeth on a Digital Equipment Corp PDP-11/44 ("Cassandra") that was a hand-me-down from Dartmouth. It had one of the original BASIC languages that had been integrated with DCL. I didn't realize the significance until much later in life. This was the foundation that I built my career upon. I'm thankful for all their hard work!
Thank you, Dartmouth College, for BASIC. I learned BASIC on a TRS-80 Model III and later on a TRS-80 Color Computer. It has led me to a career of over 36 years in IT. I think BASIC gave me the confidence that I could learn computing on my own, without needing to go to college. I remember staying at work one Friday night till 2am struggling to get a program to print some numbers exactly as I wanted them printed. So frustrating but when I finally got it working, I cut that piece out of the printout and taped it to my desk as a trophy. :) I love hearing the stories of how all these things were built. I enjoyed this very much. Thank you.
I love BASIC! I wrote my first program the same afternoon I got my first lecture in computer science ("data processing" at the time) in September 1976. My career went in another direction, but my demonstration of an early Sinclair computer with the then-awesome 128K horsepower got my kid brother into the field and into a job with a major news organization. BASIC is simple and fun. Still love it.
I learnt to program in BASIC nearly 50 years ago now and I still occasionally write Excel macros - in very basic BASIC. The macros can do a lot more than I know about but those old BASIC instructions work just fine once you learn how to address cells in the spreadsheet. So thanks 50 years on!
I started programming in BASIC in 1978 when the field engineer for the word processor we used gave me an 8 inch floppy disk containing Microsoft BASIC. An interpreter, not a compiler. At school I had been fairly competent in maths, but had no real interest in it as a subject. But how my interest was awakened when I realised what I could do with a computer! It was a revelation. Since 1978 I programmed in various BASICs, right up to Visual Basic 6, which I still use nearly every day as a hobby in my retirement. I dabbled occasionally in other computer languages, but BASIC always seemed the most approachable and one could achieve a great deal with it. Over the past 40+ years I've written over 1,000 programs, some for my own use, and more lengthy ones for the companies I worked for as a programmer. I was totally self-taught and never had even an hour's training in "how to program". This is probably exactly the same experience that many of the Dartmouth students went through. It must have been a very exciting time back then.
So great to see the roots to my 47 year career in the computer field in this video. It started with a fall '68 BASIC language computer class at the University of Toledo using a teletype into a GE time sharing computer. Thanks so much to you guys that broke this ground. My love of programming came out of know where just by taking that class. Two years later I was working full time in the field. Very nice to now understand the history of the technology we used.
Thanks for posting this fascinating story! While the geniuses at Dartmouth were creating BASIC I was struggling with FORTRAN as a freshman at the University of Washington: my final grade was a D or F. That was the end of computing for me until the mid-80s, when at work I was exposed to a DEC mini-computer with "dumb" terminals and a version of BASIC. I loved it and won a cost-saving award for writing a BASIC program that automated part of a process I used. That led in time to programming in dBASE, Word for DOS, and Visual BASIC for Applications. To this day I use VBA macros for personal stuff. Without the groundbreaking work of good folks at Dartmouth my success would not have been possible. Thanks, gentlemen!
I enjoyed every minute of this wonderful story of BASIC. It's so nice to hear it from the people who were there. Very VERY nicely done! Thank you so much for sharing this!
I absolutely loved Basic when I was 11 in 1985. My school had a classroom full of BBC Micros and it felt so wonderful in there - the clacking keys, the flick of floppy lock switches, the groans of frustration and the cheers of success. I didn't get very far before I discovered guitars and music technology but my basic understanding of coding has really been a benefit in my life. I'm very grateful to the computer teacher, Mr Claytor who was so enthusiastic, kind, humorous and welcoming - a true teacher!
Growing up in a poor family I would never have encountered a computer. In elementary school in the early 80s there was a computer and I recall there being a couple games and BASIC. all the students around me were very interested in the games but I remember only caring about BASIC it just seemed like a blank canvas where you could do anything. Years later my older sister took a job with a company that wrote software and she would let me come to work with her and play around with BASIC. I recall that summer writing a choose your own adventure story and carrying it around with me on a floppy and nowhere to run it until a day when I met a guy who was a math professor and I told him about how much I loved BASIC, He seemed moved by my story and gave me a really low end PC and set me loose giving me instruction anytime I needed help. From that day on I wrote code every day like an obsession. Every crappy job I had from then on would get a program from me to help with the job even if they didn't want it. One day I wrote an app and later discovered that the company had a multi-million dollar contract with a software company to create the same app. When they discovered that I had completed it ahead of the company and actually had a better product they fired the company and hired me as their developer. They got sued for breaking the contract and paid fines and yet told me it was all worth it for having found me. From that day I have been a full time developer, lead developer, IT Director and general nerd and I owe it all to being introduced to BASIC. Thank you Dartmouth.
The kids today are amazed when an old person can figure out how to use a smart phone. They don't know who actually invented computers. It was these old people.
KameraShy And everyone after them. Computers have evolved tremendously, and Gen-Zers have no clue about this. They are too busy playing games, which in themselves have evolved tremendously. I agree with +Dawaleeb Alhawa that if you take away their GUI, they are about as useless as they are anyway. I asked one the other day if he knew what a GUI was. He said it was something involving sex.
John Kemeny was a 27-year old full professor at Dartmouth in 1953 and it was the 20-year old undegrad students who went on to create the computer industry.
I have said this so many times. I am almost 72 now but I used to write Adventure Games for the Commodore 64 and Amiga computers as well as the Amstrad CPC464 and 6128 back in 1985/6. I now teach and am amazed at how computer ILLITERATE most young people are.
Thank you John Kemeny. Because of you I learned basic as a high school sophomore in 1971. Because of you I had a wonderful and fulfilling career. One never knows whose lives they will touch.
Love this story. It is not just about the development of Basic and computing and how it affected the students and the country and the world, but the human story that made it happen.
I had a TRS80 model 1 in 1985-6 that supported BASIC. I built it from parts found at the Radio Shack surplus store. I was 16 and learned quite a lot before the power supply shorted sending 110v AC through the whole system! BASIC was the root of my programming knowledge and it will always have a special place in my memories.
What an amazing video. We used to use an acoustic couple 110/300 baud landline from a teletype to a number of computers in the Phoenix area in the mid 70s when I was in high school. One of those was a Honeywell GCOS system. Honeywell had bought GE's computer division there, the same building shown in the video here. They also sponsored an Explorer post (414) in computer science, which met for some years in that building. I knew Dartmouth had developed time sharing systems, but I never looked into the history of that. This really is amazing and shows the sharp contrast between 'batch' and time sharing and some of the divisions in the computer folks at the time. Honeywell had a process control division as well, and that got me into my career path of many years. Computers built to control or monitor processes, such a nuclear power plants or oil refineries. Amazing how much times have changed from those one word memory boards.
I did my first BASIC programming on an IBM 360 mainframe that I never actually saw. It was located at SUNY Buffalo, and I was in high school in a small town in Northern New York State connected by a phone line with a 300 baud modem. But I LOVED being able to actually make a computer do what I told it to do. It began my love for technology that I turned into a life-long career. Thank you, pioneers in BASIC! 🙂
What a beautiful video of such an interesting story. For those who grew up with computers in the 80s, BASIC was a given. It just came with every computer. Learning the history of how it was made makes a great language into something special.
I am from Australia. I started with Multi User BASIC on Data General computers. When Windows was spreading, I used Visual Basic 1.0 through 6.x. Among other things, I developed a software product for monitoring licensing of Windows applications. That software was sold to Tally Systems, of Hanover, MA, a few miles down the road from Dartmouth College which by chance I visited one day. I never knew BASIC was born there. Fascinating documentary. Thank you to all those pioneers. Yes, the journey really was fun!
I learnt BASIC on the BBC Micro (Model B) in grade 8 in 1988 while I was studying at New Era High School, a boarding school at Panchgani, a small hill-station near Pune (India). The school had set up a computer lab in partnership with a Bombay firm. I think I was very fortunate to get introduced to computer programming as a middle school student and BASIC felt very natural from the outset. There was no editor to learn. You entered the REPL directly and used line numbers to code your program, re-entering them if you wanted to edit a line. Simply brilliant! Our computer lab had its own library which contained many great books and I vividly remember learning stuff that wasn't being taught in the class, even learning 6502 assembly! BASIC programming had soon became my passion. The satisfaction of completing a program and watching it run and unfold as you had intended cannot be put in to words. I learned so much just copying program listings from books and magazines and modifying them. When the lab got a dot-matrix printer, I read the manual cover-to-cover, got its graphics printing working and went wild writing screen-dumps and lots of programs for the printer along with many games. BASIC definitely changed my life for I would later choose a career in computers and programming over inheriting my father's manufacturing business as a young graduate. Thank you for sharing this story.
BASIC in 1988 is what got me started in what later became a 25+ year career. All because of a Commodore64 SX60 that came with BASIC compiler and manuals. There was no networking I was on my own.
With all its drawbacks, BASIC was (and perhaps still is) a great language for introducing people to computing. It was the first language I was taught at school in 1985, and we did practice on Commodore PET, C-64 and TI-99/4A, all fitted with ROM BASIC. Sometime later, out of curiosity about computers, I got a (photo) copy of "Basic Programming", by no others than Kurtz and Kemeny!! It is amazing to know their story! A great thank you to the people of Dartmouth for making and posting this video.
The 1st PC folks at the papermill stayed up working on typing for hours BASIC programs into essentially very little powered PCs,IBM. Storage was 360 51/4 floppies if you could get it,so small if you forgot and turned off machine all you typed was gone, if you forgot to save it BUT they had miney to buy machines since Unions bargained for wages increases annually minimuk wage was $3.15/hr Papermill was $6,50 something.
Please, no. BASIC still is, and has always been, the best way to cripple young minds and forge bad programmers. Your teachers in '85 could have known better: Pascal, Smalltalk, ML, Prolog (to name just a few) would have made your first approach to computing much more rewarding and fascinating. Trust me...
@@marcofaustinelli7010 "Please, no. BASIC still is, and has always been, the best way to cripple young minds and forge bad programmers." Is there any real evidence for this claim?
I took my first computer course in 1987. The class was full of 1st-year computer science students, but I took BASIC as an elective as a senior. Many of the students thought they wanted to "do computers." You don't "do computers" any more than a carpenter "does hammers." The class thinned out heavily after the first couple of coding exercises. BASIC was a tremendous first filter.
Absolutely love this this history. Basic was the first programming language I learned. I have dabbled in 3 others but always come back to a version of Basic. It’s simplicity is unmatched. Thanks to all the folks that made this RUclips video available.
I mean, people like to shit on Universities, and it's true, the financial burden for students right now is *insane* and we need to make college as cheap or free as it used to be back then. However, having said that, we still have amazing Universities in the United States doing incredible work. To take one example, my alma mater, the University Of Washington, does most of the deep R&D that ends up going into Microsoft products (and of course the rest of the world too), particularly in advanced techniques like A.I. When I was going there, MS was funding something like 10 or more such research projects at once. A LOT of the stuff being used right now today in computing happened right there, and the spirit of it was similar to the spirit of this. In fact, we have some really incredible programs on campuses right now and probably more of them, by far, than we did back then. Having said that, I think that MOST people would be better served by Online courses today for basic undergraduate studies, if they are not into research and academics. Online courses are finally getting amazing now because they hire the very best professors and masters in the world and can deploy their lectures all over the world for years. It's a lot harder to get the very best in the world at your particular college, unless you happen to be going to Stanford, MIT, or somewhere like that. Online, you can find the very best in each subject no matter what, without regards to geography. Plus, you get to learn at your own pace, rewind and pause the lectures, and so forth and so on. For those who want to live the academic lifestyle permanently, there's nothing better than a physical campus. And honestly, that's one of the very best lifestyles in general if you're a nerd. A good campus feels like an amazing place to be and make school actually fun and fulfilling. And if you want to permanently be surrounded by other intellectual (aka non-idiotic) human beings, that's one of the very best ways to do it. And then you usually just become a professor or something so you can make money going to school instead of losing money going to school.
Like everything else it is politics ruining Universities, You will learn a lot at a university and apply it if that’s your desire. Yes people buying degrees need to be stopped. Again many politicians do for them and their children.
I owe $35,000+ for TWO YEARS of a university that offered a "Web Commerce" degree in the late 1990's. I didn't know any better. In those two years I really learned very little. The instructors, as I would later come to find out, were career rejects and business "crossovers" trying to teach IT courses. I will never be able to pay off that loan because I don't work in the IT field (not enough education or any certs to speak of), I am stuck working in the freight industry tying down and transporting cargo with a forklift. It's sad :(
@@RolandHutchinson true that...but i learned on punch cards, and they would clear themselves when the card reader freaked...ahh, the painful old days...
Wonderful video. I started programming in BASIC on a timeshared HP2000 machine in 1972 in high school. My first class taught that BASIC was invented by Kemeny and Kurtz, but I never knew more about who they were or how that happened until now. This video brought back the excitement of those early days, though I have since received a PhD in CS and worked at national research laboratories. It has also given me new drive to complete my current research. Thank you for this.
Myself as well, starting in 72 in 8th grade for me. HP Timeshare BASIC, on a HP-2000 va teletype and acoustic modem. TIES was that one. I also had numbers and (‘borrowed’) credentials for access to MECC and MERITS, also timeshare basic OS .. Ah the days of leaving the punch tape turned on to steal credentials
First up the music was great. I went to year 11 and 12 high school in Tasmania, Australia, 1974-75. We had teletype consoles, and stored our programs on punched tape. Our school was connected via telephone lines to a central computer about 300 kilometres away. We learnt basic. Great documentary. John Kemeny must have been an exceptional individual.
I programmed in BASIC using a dumb terminal via an acoustic coupler in 1969 when I was 14 years old. To save your work we used a paper tape. It has been amazing to see the entire computing revolution from the very beginning to the present time.
Ditto. Inside the punch tape units was a 256 bit core memory. One of ours was broken. I took it apart, found the broken wire, added a short fine wire and soldered it. Fixed. Gee, I think that makes me old, having actually seen, handled and repaired core memory. Lol.
What a delightful trip down memory lane. I started work at NOAA in 1974 as a cartographer. Pen and ink were still mainstays of this craft but I could see limitless improvements were possible if we could get the primitive computers we had to do the drawing. Much of the task involved insuring every dot on a piece of paper had a geographic co-ordinate. Fortran, despite it's problems, was the tool we used. Thousands of IBM punch cards, countless hours waiting for computed results, and then the joy of realizing we had a digital record that would never disappear and could be used generations later. Those were good old days which I had forgotten about until watching this video. Thankyou. I now live way out in the boonies where the cost of truck fuel or firewood is a major topic of daily discussion. Were I to attempt drawing any of the folk out here into a discussion about those past days it would soon end in blank stares.
What a wonderful tribute. BASIC is how I started learning at the dawn of the PC age, and although I quickly moved on to other languages, I never really appreciated just how much it contributed to computing until now. Thanks so much!
Many of those “scholar-athletes” in football and basketball never even complete their degree. Meanwhile, a serious student falls into student debt hell.
What an inspiring and uplifting story of Kemeny and the extra smart students he encouraged and fostered. I remember learning Fortran, then Algol - then there was Basic whose simplicity confused me. How could something so simple be capable enough to produce wonder? Eventually I studied Assembler, one step up from computer language, and my joy was complete!
Great video! I am a retired engineer, but hadn’t heard all of this early Basic development history. Took my 1st college pgm’ing class in 71 (FORTRAN). Learned Basic in 74 & many other languages over my career. I’m fortunate to have seen the evolution of computers & operation systems from the IBM 360 to the modern day computer.😎👍
I was a young newlywed of modest means when I bought a TI 9/4A at the fire sale price of $40 in 1983. The package included a three ring binder with a programmer’s reference to TI‘s version of the Basic language. I studied that thing so carefully and I reproduced the version of an Apple computer program that I found in a magazine to run on the TI. I learned a lot of great programming concepts that transferred directly to other languages later on. I’m grateful, too.
At the Case Institute of Technology in the fall of 1961 a required freshman course was titled 'Introduction to Numerical Analysis' taught by professor Fred Way. It was a course in computer programming using the language Algol. In March, 1984 IBM produced the IBM PC Jr. which came with a Basic module. I remember seeing Basic code and thinking, "Wow, that looks like Algol!" If you knew Algol, learning Basic was a snap. God bless everyone involved!
watching these documentaries on old school computing is great motivation for doing my programming homework. Now, back to those problems on inheritance and polymorphism....
Thank you for this wonderful documentary on BASIC. I started programming in BASIC when I was 6 or 7 on a second-hand ZX81 in the early 1980s, thanks to Sir Clive Sinclair's computer and Dartmouth's BASIC.
Great story. BASIC was my first programming language in late 80's Australia. At age 8, I can confirm that it's very easy to understand; important for wide adoption by non-technical users, which is the key to 'crossing the chasm' to use a marketing term.
I started out with BASIC all by myself around 33 years ago. I didn’t know the language’s history, somehow I thought that it was credited to Bill Gates. Thank you for giving us this beautiful lesson on its real beginnings. Thank you, Professors Kemeny and Kurtz🙏. Much respect to Dartmouth.
Watching this took me back in time to 1981, which was when I took a "Computer Math" course in high school. We learned to program in BASIC on an Exidy Sorcerer followed by several Commodore Pet models. All of this led to an addiction to programming a great career in software engineering and IT management roles. I found this documentary to be very nostalgic and surprised at how far BASIC and computing advanced in a span of less than 20 years from the creation of BASIC to when I starting writing my first BASIC programs. Thank you for this video.
As a kid, I first learned to program in BASIC on a Commodore PET - the first model PET with the 'chicklet' keyboard. And I followed this up with a fantastic career as a Computer Engineer. If I saw that old model PET again I would run over to it and hug it! 💖 No joke! Fond memories.
My father was one of the earliest programmers having been employed by a management consulting firm (Towers Perrin) in the late '50s and used to take us to the office on weekends--we would play on the punch card machines while he did his programming and compiling. He had started in the mail room and learned computing on the job. I remember how excited he was when they eventually got the IBM 360/370. My personal experience came in '74 at Case Western Reserve, programming in Algol on the Univac Chi 1108. I actually learned Algol before BASIC, which I didn't learn until getting into personal computers. I didn't find Algol all that difficult--it just didn't use enough English language words and syntax to appear as friendly to the average person.
When my grandfather tried to get me interested in BASIC in the early 90's, I had't realised how big a piece of history it was. Later, I unfortunately didn't have the time to get into and appreciate this piece of history. Now that I do, I wish he were still there with me to share this exploration from the past, he had so much academic experience in physics and computing from that era. I miss him.
@@B_Bodziak Not entirely sure what you mean by your question, BASIC was still very much in use in the early 90, though its popularity had begun to wane. BASIC and Pascal were what my grandpa used to use so I don't see why he would teach me anything else, with all the resources (software, hardware and documentation) he had on hand. Also the most recent release of Chipmunk Basic, the BASIC interpreter he provided me with, was released in 2019, so it's still not quite dead yet.
A great video. The Dartmouth system also benefited high school students (like me in Exeter, NH) via a remote connection. I still have the original Basic manual and a printout of my first program in 1969.
I was writing BASIC programs at Lindsay Place High School in Pointe Claire, a suburb of Montreal, in 1973. We used the same sort of acoustic coupler modem, and ASR 33 teletype. It was GLORIOUS! Thank you for this wonderful history. I'm still writing programs, now for a living, but have moved on to JavaScript and web development. Even back at LPHS we knew BASIC came from Dartmouth.
A very rewarding introduction to basic in human emotional terms. I needed this back story to understand the people involved and the reality of pushing information into our time. Thanks
I learned BASIC in school, maybe around 1989. It was pretty outdated already, but fascinating for me. I then got a home computer with DOS 5 with QBasic, which was a revelation - functions, loops, multiline IFs - at that point I learned to create my favourite handlend games on my computer, and became really passionate about programming. Never looked back!
Wow this really takes me back. I started learning computing back in 1962/3 on a Ferranti Pegasus. The original machine is in the Science Museum in South Kensington in London UK. Input was on punched cards, output on punched paper tape which you then fed through a reader and it was printed using a teletype. This was at Brooklands Technical College, in Weybridge, Surrey.
Год назад+2
I started learning BASIC in 1985, and never stopped ever since. This movie brought to light the story and the humane side of it all, since its beginnings. Great watch!
Great documentary and very informative! I missed basic basic but did mess around as a kid on a 386/SLC33 using MS-Basic. I then went on to run a BBS for close to 20 years writing several games for it and having an monthly active user list of 1600 people dialing in and did not before now know where that load sharing capabilities came from. Thank to all these early Pioneers for giving me the opportunities I was able to enjoy. Good work!
In the late 60s I used the Dartmouth time sharing computer via TWX (teletype) machines at GE TEMPO in Santa Barbara, California. I used both Algol and Basic. The only glitch we had was often we would get a busy signal when we dialed in to the Dartmouth machine. The glitch was that the modem at the Darmouth end would not hang up correctly after a previous user disconnected. The solution was that Dartmount gave us the phone number of the operators so we could call them to get the modem ready for a new call.
Founding fathers of Basic. We appreciate you! Without you I'd have no RUclips channel where I discuss assembly language and C64 Basic, or even a website teaching programming.
I programmed in BASIC for the first time in 1981 when I was 9 years old on a TI/99 4A that my parents sacrificed a lot of money to purchase for me. They saw the future that I didn’t yet have the ability to see. Since then I have had a great career working for Boeing, NASA, and a variety of other great places. I owe it all to BASIC and the introduction to computing in general. These early pioneers were true geniuses.
Ayup. Ditto, mostly. Here's to many many hours of transcribing page after page from _Compute!_ magazine. 🍻
@@WalterBurton Same here, and in addition to Compute! magazine there was Byte magazine. My brother and I would take turns, one of us reading out the program code and the other typing it into the TI-99/4A. We wrote several of our own games and other programs, as well as entering them from the magazines.
Isn't it a true crime that M$ knifed, stole, & railroaded technology in it's infancy. I fully believe that had that NOT happened, we would have a MUCH better technological world than we now have. MUCH better.
Interesting... 15 years after that, I discovered BASIC at the age of 11, but I didn't know how to get an interpreter for my home PC. So I bought a TI99/4A from a thrift shop and did exactly the same thing
Me too. BASIC may be "looked down" on nowadays but I'm sure an awful lot of programmers made their first efforts in programming with some version of BASIC.
My brother bought a ZX81 in the early 80's. I was 11-12ísh at the time. I figured a lot out on my own but he taught me when I asked for help. Later the Acorn BBC, gwBasic came by . Later PASCAl entered my life (in my opinion way underestimated) but I owe a lot to BASIC, for sure.
I never really got a carreer out of it but hobby programming did teach me to divide big problems into several small problems. I work in education and this helps me a lot with assisting students.
I'm from Brazil, and I learned BASIC language in 1980 with a TK-82C running a Z80 microprocessor. It was the begging of a love story with computers for all my life. So I feel myself a member of the Dartmouth computer community.🙌
I remember as a kid, copying games in BASIC out of magazines to run on my computer. After a while, you started figuring out the commands were and how the syntax was layed out. After a while, my friends and I were making our own "basic" games. I think in the 80's it was every kid's entry point in to computing.
I did the same thing! On a trs80. Wow... Brings back memories!
@@patriotdoc1776 I actually think the way those computers from the late 70s-mid 80s were with the basic and the cassette tapes, made computer programming a lot more accessible to kids than it is now, despite computer devices being literally everywhere.
what's your current career?
That short story while rolling the end credits is moving enough to make a grown man cry. What a testament of Kemeny that was.
Right? He fundamentally changed the lives of so many people, and he could even see it coming. My mother learned programming on Basic, went on to design shuttle software for NASA. She taught me coding at age 5, and now I'm using that to teach and automate/innovate/inspire high school students to earn scholarships through using technology with human care to help dramatically improve SAT scores. Inspiring people to see what they are capable of through making it simple is an amazingly powerful thing. ❤️
Wow! What a story, I really enjoyed it. I did a BASIC course at the Australian National University in 1975, been messing with computers ever since - I am now 81 years old and still doing it.
An actual course would've helped me out as a kid a lot. My friends and I learned from code in magazines and then experimenting on our own. Learning good habits and techniques probably would've been a big plus. You learn hard habits to break that cross-over languages.
You beat me to it Fred. I thought I must be the oldest at 74, and still making a living out of VB.
Good grief! That's some stamina you've got, Fred; i was a programmer at Marconi Co Ltd in 1965 (aged 16), i enjoyed it then (and loved Algol-60), but by age 21 it had started to become more of a chore than a pleasure, and i was so happy at age 26 when i got my PhD because it meant i wouldn't have to program any more - i could get other people to do it for me! 😊
*81 years young brother. Keep on truckin’.
my father is also 81, and he doesn't even know the 1st thing about computers. haaaaa. He's still afraid to turn-on a laptop.
I was 15 when I started programming with Basic in september 1980, thanks to a priest who paid half the cost of 6 PET Commodore computers because the school would not pay for it. I am forever grateful to this man for sharing so generously his passion for programming. Thanks Gilles Marceau for changing many lives.
My father taught me in 1977 on his first PET to write BASIC. I ended up sitting in front of the computer until 3 or 4 a.m. and he got really angry. I was 12 or 13 back then.
@Peter Alexander Wow, 7 yo !
@@GerritSchulze Lucky you ! I I had to go home ( from school ) at 10 pm because that generous priest I was talking about made sure no one was there too late. The best time of my life...
@Peter Alexander Basic isn't dead, and is alive and well to this day. Microsoft Office uses VBA (Visual Basic for Application) as its programming language, which retains much of the original syntax: For Next, If Then Else, etc. It still works even if you use line numbers like in the old days: e.g. 100 If x y Then Goto 200
@@rabidfollower VBA is only similar to old basic, much of the more advanced syntax like OOP comes from C++ like just about every OOP language does.
I learned BASIC when I built my first computer, an Altair, in 1975. I went on to have a 16 year career at the phone company as an analyst/software engineer. I wrote almost everything in BASIC. Thanks guys, you made this highschool graduate's career possible.
What did you do after that?
I bought an already assembled Altair in 1977 and learned Basic. 40+ years and still writing code!
I was a "Kiewit Systems Programmer" from 1968 till 1971. We were all undergraduates, most of us with no computer experience when we came to Dartmouth. Thanks to Professor Kemeny, we got an incredible education in computing, and we got paid! Professor Kemeny was a visionary, an incredible leader. He was also a teacher to the core. The choice to depend on inexperienced undergraduates to invent what was, for that time, a cutting edge system, took courage. I believe that Professor Kemeny made that choice to give us a learning opportunity we could not have gotten in a classroom.
Several of the speakers in this video had returned to campus while I was there, and were also great teachers and mentors.
I can not begin to express my gratitude for the opportunity Professor Kemeny and Dartmouth gave me.
Somebody needs to tell this story to Prof. Scott Galloway.
@@archlab007 Sorry, don't know him, but I've told this story (often will a few more words!) many times. I'm always happy to repeat it. Dartmouth, and Kiewit, helped me find my path to a fulfilling and rewarding career.
John G. Kemeny (born Kemény János György) deserves way more recognition than the small page on Wikipedia there is about him now. To me he is one of the greatest of computer history because he had the vision that everyone needed to be able to understand and use a computer. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_G._Kemeny
As a Dartmouth student from 1968-1972, I had the opportunity to begin using BASIC as soon as I arrived on campus. As I recall, every single one of us freshmen were guided into Kiewit (the computer center), personally introduced to the DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing System), seated in front of a terminal and personally taught how to operate the terminal and get on the system. All of us = 800 or so freshmen. We all had the opportunity to learn to write BASIC even before our first classes were to begin. I learned to do so. Later on, during the winter term of my sophomore year, I took an introductory course in what I would label "survey research sociology" (Sociology 8), taught by Professor Jim Davis, a brilliant guy. During that course we were taught all sorts of ways of statistically analyzing data to create multi-variable causal models designed to provide insights into causes and/or correlates of political opinions, population growth rates, all sorts of things. We then composed our theories, sat at terminals and ran PROJECT IMPRESS, a unique timesharing program which analyzed data from various surveys. Thereafter we wrote papers touting our theories and justifying them through the use of PROJECT IMPRESS results. We thought nothing of using a full second or more of computer time. It was a remarkable era. Alas, I graduated, went to law school across the country at UCBerkeley and never knew what transpired thereafter. What a great major, great professors, great college and great time. I will forever miss it.
Jim Davis became the father of the "General Social Survey" which is a major biannual national survey of many things. It got adopted by the NSF and is a major social science resource that is used and updated to this day.
@@michaeljoneil Thank you so much for the important postscript.
Why on earth would you go into law after that amazing experience with computing?!
I learned BASIC on the TRS-80 in 1979 in Kirkland Washington, near Redmond where Microsoft has its main campus. It was my introduction to computers. In 1997 I started my first company in Seattle, an IT firm focusing on Security and Data Recovery. Today I am in Ukraine working on a couple of companies centered around the IT industry. Thank you Dartmouth. I did not know you were the daddy of BASIC.
Are you still in Ukraine?
I hope you and your family are safe if you’re still in the Ukraine. I also learned Basic on the TRaSh-80 CoCo that my dad got our family for Christmas of 1980. It had 16KB of RAM and a cassette recorder for storage and games. It also had a game port. I still have it and a few of the cassettes of programs I created. I was mainly interested in animation and because of the limited RAM you had to choose if you wanted more pages and colors but lower resolution or fewer pages and colors but higher resolution. To draw a circle you had to put in the grid coordinates, the radius, then you had an option to die a full circle or a partial circle, then you could fill the circle if you wanted, and of course you had to use Sin and Cos to plot the circle. I was designing cars, trying to recreate the light show from a Pink Floyd concert I had seen, dabbled with some of my favorite Sci-Fi series ships flying across the scene with 8-bit music I programmed in a subroutine. Now I go into Blender and I think about the hours of coding I did in Basic and I laugh at how easy the kids have it with Blender!
I hope he's still there and safe too. Even if he's out of there in the free world I'm very sure he's helping his country fellows to make all efforts to defeat the Russian bastard!!!
Character graphics! I wrote my first "game" in BASIC on a TRASH-80 in a school class. Tape backup and all. Around the same, my folks got me the first 128k Mac and I ended up writing raytracing software on the Mac II when it came out c1990. Yeah - realtime raytracing nowadays is insane. :) @@rwfrench66GenX
November 10, 1954
Specifications for
The IBM Mathematical FORmula
FORTRAN
Basic is 90% Fortran, but it is Interpreter, perfect for small microcomputer
L' équipe était libre d'action chez IBM
Bonnes promenades
The thing I enjoyed most was that for Kemeny, it was having his students excel into the future. To be so free with your knowledge and desirous of the next generation to succeed is the definition of selflessness and greatness. Thank you Mr. Kemeny!
One of the finest comments I have read in a long time.
"It is the greatest achievement of a teacher to enable his students to surpass him." -J Kemeny.
What a wonderful video. I was writing BASIC code on those teletype machines at the University of Louisville in 1972 and I loved it. That was the beginning of my career in programming. I am now retired, but I want to publicly thank Professors Kemeny and Kurtz and all of those who made BASIC possible.
Don Shepherd what was it like to go from teletype to monitors and keyboards a release or no change.
I used teletypes and BASIC while in college. In 1974 I went to work for the US Census Bureau as a FORTRAN programmer on the Univac 1108. We punched our FORTRAN source code and runstream (Univac's job control language) onto IBM cards and used the 1108's strictly as batch machines. In a couple of years the bureau got some teletypes and we were able to share them and enter our code that way instead of cards, in what was called "demand" mode. In a couple more years each programming office (containing about 6 programmers) got one CRT terminal that we shared, and we entered our code and tested our programs via the CRT terminals. Each advance in technology was welcomed by us, it made our jobs easier.
Don Shepherd thank you I have never seen a teletype,punch card,paper tape other than on youtube.
Don Shepherd amazing
I started at college the year after they got rid of their paper-tape reader and last teletype... I always feel I missed out on that.
With the help of a Radio Shack TRS-80 and a curiosity about a thing called BASIC, my thought patterns were changed forever after.
I'm a programming lecturer today (since 2017), and it's hard to express when teaching how unbelievably smart these guys are/were. BASIC was the first programming language I worked with in the early 90s, and it was considered kind of old even then, but it made programming more accessible that it had ever been. I mainly teach C++ and C#, and I'm standing on the shoulders of giants in terms of how incredible the work these guys did to enable the work of programming for the average person was.
I taught myself basic in the mid 1970s on a Data General Nova that supported 16 users in 32k bytes of memory. That experience got me started on a career that lasted a until retirement last year. Thank you Dartmouth for starting it all.
I worked on DTSS - Dartmouth Time Sharing operating system - as an undergraduate from 1972 to 1976. John Kemeny was no longer involved day to day but many of the folks in this video were still involved. That time and that experience and the other folks I worked with provided me with a basis for a wonderful career. I took an advanced math course in probability and statistics taught by Kemeny. His teaching was excellent, he made the material come alive.
I took a class in BASIC in 1983 when my middle son, age 13, was learning it in school. We would write simple programs together on his computer. If the only thing it did for me was to bring my son and I together more -- no small feat with a teenage boy -- then it was worth it. He soon outpaced me. He went on to ITT and has had a very successful career because of his love for things technical, logical and mathematical. I really enjoyed this history video.
That's good, but what happened when he had to deal with illogical things.......like women?
I started with BASIC on digital equipment 1978. Then did BASIC on Commodore, Apple and BASICA on IBM PC, then many variants, MS Visual Basic (they dropped BASIC as an acronym and made if Basic), then VB.Net. Finally gave it up with C#. Now I do python, PHP and still C#.
THANK YOU Kemeny and Kurtz and Dartmouth college
In 1983, we purchased a Commodore 64. I had done some programming at uni in the 60's, but was too dirty a programmer to get much success when it took 3 weeks to get back an error statement "the flagged statement or the one before it has an error, perhaps a comma missing from a list" - still remember that mongrel message word for word after 56 years. With the 64 I and my then 7 year old son learned basic; it was a hobby for both of us, and brought us together. My son now designs PCBs. I am now retired, still build websites using .php; principles still the same, and I am still accused of talking gibberish when explaining technical matters by those who do not wish to learn. Still have to debug every idea I too quickly code. As NED said "such is life".
You're the best mom ever. I wish mine had been like you. But she was 18 in '83 and I was 2 so not much chance.
@@sheridenboord7853 or misogynists.
I too learned to program in BASIC on an 8K Commodore PET. I am now 83 years old and have been a Scratch user for the last 14 years. As students were eager to learn BASIC, they are just as eager to program in Scratch which now has (I think) around 50 million registered users most of which are youngsters. Thanks for this wonderful, historic video.
I enjoyed seeing you say you use Scratch. It's nice to know I'm not the only one who realizes it's not just a "kiddie" language (much like how LOGO was seen, back in the day).
The Scratch community has now grown to almost 150 million! @@jimbobago
I was born in 1972 and I learned BASIC in 1984 for the first time. I used a Commodore 64. Back in that year I was really the only one who was programming (I was a 'nerd' let's say). Still I knew that this was a very important thing. It was a pitty that the schools in Belgium were not yet ready for this.
If you bail when the closing credits roll, you will miss a heartfelt personal tribute to Kemeny (by I believe the filmmaker). Go back and listen - it’s worth it. 35:50
I really have to scratch my head and wonder why oh why? every time I watch an informative video on technical subjects which is laced with such obnoxious and irritating background music
Remember using basic from 1988 to 1995
oh my, it is so sad
Thanks for the "heads up". I stayed, it was well worth it.
I began tearing up as I listened to the tribute.
We stand on the shoulders of giants.
So does everyone who works or has worked in the Electronics field. No more working to make a circuit with connections in bowls of mercury.
I realize that wasn’t in the documentary, but it still holds true. Also, none of us made our own vacuum tubes for amplifiers.
The giant is looking up your skirt.
I can't give enough thanks to the team that developed BASIC. I learned it as a child in the early 80's and it directed the course of my entire career.
I didn't know that the final minutes would bring tears to my eyes, nor that John Kemeny would become one of my heroes.
Right? ❤️
This video is a masterpiece of oral history. Wow.
A man named Mr. Anderson lit an eternal fire in me when he taught me how to program BASIC at a San Mateo high school where we had two ASR-33 teletypes connected to a remote HP-2000 computer. He taught a bunch of us even though he was already let go for preaching the value of computer education. The school heads disagreed, thought it was a waste of time, and gave him the pink slip.
I wish I can find Mr. Anderson - the best teacher I ever had. He had given me a lifelong gift, an insatiable curiosity for computers, and a lucrative career. I loved that man dearly. Seems like John Kemeny was from the same mold.
@Mdmchannel No. Aragon High School
Mr. Anderson? NEO?!
Beginner's all-purpose system instruction code. Basic that I remember.
@@jamesanderson401 S=Symbolic if I remember correctly
Those people that let him go were very stupid people
I was teaching in a small rural school when we acquired our first Radio Shack TRS-80. Over the next couple of years I wrote a number of educational programs and games in BASIC for the kids to use, and I taught them to write their own. It was such a simple and effective computer language!
@Buddy Austin Schools got a discount from Apple, so my little school eventually acquired a couple of IIe computers and an Imagewriter printer. Then we got an "Apple for the teacher" grant and six IIc computers. Our staff didn't use them much, so using them as a base, I set them up in a spare classroom. I solicited several other IIe and IIc castoffs from the community and our computer lab was born!
WAS such a simple and effective computer language? It still is!
That was my first computer. The TRS-80 Model 1. I still have it to this day!
I wrote BASIC on a radio shack unit when I was 13 in the early 80s. Making games was my favorite thing to do.
I nagged and begged my mother, who was a self-employed translator and a single mother of three with two toddlers to supply for, for half a year back in 1981 when I was 10 years old to buy me a Sinclair ZX Spectrum (and later a Commodore C128) and she finally did. I used it to teach myself BASIC and coding during long nights in a darkened room, trying to be stealth and not making her aware of what I was doing, because I had to go to school the next day. Little did she know that her decision to buy me this computer which she could barely afford back then would define my entire professional career. She has passed, but I will be forever grateful for the sacrifices she made to enable me and my sisters to go on and have a good life.
For me it was '82 and a Tandy Color Computer.
no budget for computers? but theres budget for furniture? A computer is a furniture.. GENIUS
No no, it's a _computing workstation..._ like, you know, a _desk._ It's *totally* furniture.
The LGP 30 cost more than the average house which in 1959 was about $10,000.
That was definitely not the last time this was done. I saw it being done al the years I worked in Tech
@@gwenynorisu6883 I have a rather warm hat rack, personally... and I don't even wear a hat.
@@alfa-psi Did you just pull a super ninjous move on a 1 year old post?
Man, you're insanity. Sorry I mean your.
I wish there were more programming documentaries like this. Thanks for sharing!
Dartmouth taking credit where no credit is due. I would expect a more impartial documentary.
Memo No. 0 was a memo on memos. When I heard that I just burst our laughing! It's just so perfect! Every organisation should have a memo 0 !!!
As a SW engineer, whenever I create a list for work or at home, I always start with 0.
In 1975 when I was 12 my Fathers company Ilford Films) bought a Honeywell Time Sharing system and trained a lot of the management in production control where he worked. He brought all the training materials home, and I taught myself BASIC and wrote some programs, which he would take to work and type in during his lunch hour and bring home the results, sometimes making minor corrections but he always made me work out what he had done first. Because of this I opted to do a computer studies course as my "O" level options, and ended up going to Exeter University )UK) to do a Computer Studies degree.
I never realized at the time how new BASIC was, really, having been invented shortly after I was born. BASIC certainly transformed computing, making it accessable to millions of people who would otherwise probablly never had access to computers, or the time to learn enough to make use of them.
A story I can GOTO anytime :-)
Yehaa
But it will have to happen unconditionally. :p
Rogelio Perea I see what you did there..... ;)
Now let‘s RESUME work.
Never use goto lol
I owe massive thanks to Prof Kemeny for my career and livelihood. I learnt to program BASIC on the VIC 20 in the early 80s and have worked in programming all my adult life.
Me too. I started in 1975, a little bit after keyboards came out and programmers didn't have to flip front-panel switches and program in Assembler like they did on the IMSAI-8080. (Ghastly level of tedium!) My motivation was to test blackjack card-counting strategies and poker hands. Great fun. Led to a 38-year programming career. Still coding in QuickBasic 4.5 to test stock market technical analysis ideas. Developing and debugging small programs in a DOS Basic interpreter environment is soooooo much faster than using a compiler like VB.NET.
#MeToo
@@Leutchik While my first programs were hand-assembled and entered in hex onto a SC/MP evaluation board using a DEC terminal (I think the monitor ROM was KITBUG) I also clunked out a couple of programs on 8080 systems that were connected to ASR-33 Teletypes. I love those, by the way. Such a beautiful action.. As you depress the key without too much force, at some point in the key travel, you feel the electromechanicals take over and complete the action as well as hammer a letter onto the paper. Anyway, (started to reminisce there) I just wanted to add that 2 or 3 years later, I borrowed a workmate's Mini-Scamp (early Australian computer kit project from Electronics Australia magazine, designed by Dr John Kennewell in 1976 and beautified by Jim Rowe) and entered a tone-playing program along with numbers denoting note pitch and duration for Eric Clapton's guitar break in "Presence of the Lord" - all using toggle switches! :-))
I think the sight of so many beautiful ASR-33's in this documentary set me off..
All in favor for Commodore 64 and the VIC 20, say "I"!
In the 80's, I was lucky enough to cut my teeth on a Digital Equipment Corp PDP-11/44 ("Cassandra") that was a hand-me-down from Dartmouth. It had one of the original BASIC languages that had been integrated with DCL. I didn't realize the significance until much later in life. This was the foundation that I built my career upon. I'm thankful for all their hard work!
I started on BASIC in 1968. Kemeny & Kurtz was a book. It's wonderful to see the men behind the names, and inspiring to hear the story.
"This is fun!" the heart of a good programmer.
As a nerd, I found this to be very interesting :D
the audio story durring the credits shows what kind of a teacher Kemeny was, a true hero.
Thank you, Dartmouth College, for BASIC.
I learned BASIC on a TRS-80 Model III and later on a TRS-80 Color Computer.
It has led me to a career of over 36 years in IT.
I think BASIC gave me the confidence that I could learn computing on my own, without needing to go to college.
I remember staying at work one Friday night till 2am struggling to get a program to print some numbers exactly as I wanted them printed. So frustrating but when I finally got it working, I cut that piece out of the printout and taped it to my desk as a trophy. :)
I love hearing the stories of how all these things were built.
I enjoyed this very much. Thank you.
I love BASIC! I wrote my first program the same afternoon I got my first lecture in computer science ("data processing" at the time) in September 1976. My career went in another direction, but my demonstration of an early Sinclair computer with the then-awesome 128K horsepower got my kid brother into the field and into a job with a major news organization. BASIC is simple and fun. Still love it.
What a wonderful story. Anyone who makes a living in computing owes much to John Kemeny. BASIC was the first language I learned.
I learnt to program in BASIC nearly 50 years ago now and I still occasionally write Excel macros - in very basic BASIC. The macros can do a lot more than I know about but those old BASIC instructions work just fine once you learn how to address cells in the spreadsheet. So thanks 50 years on!
Awesome!
PAC-MAN
I started programming in BASIC in 1978 when the field engineer for the word processor we used gave me an 8 inch floppy disk containing Microsoft BASIC. An interpreter, not a compiler. At school I had been fairly competent in maths, but had no real interest in it as a subject. But how my interest was awakened when I realised what I could do with a computer! It was a revelation. Since 1978 I programmed in various BASICs, right up to Visual Basic 6, which I still use nearly every day as a hobby in my retirement. I dabbled occasionally in other computer languages, but BASIC always seemed the most approachable and one could achieve a great deal with it. Over the past 40+ years I've written over 1,000 programs, some for my own use, and more lengthy ones for the companies I worked for as a programmer. I was totally self-taught and never had even an hour's training in "how to program". This is probably exactly the same experience that many of the Dartmouth students went through. It must have been a very exciting time back then.
So great to see the roots to my 47 year career in the computer field in this video.
It started with a fall '68 BASIC language computer class at the University of Toledo using a teletype into a GE time sharing computer.
Thanks so much to you guys that broke this ground.
My love of programming came out of know where just by taking that class.
Two years later I was working full time in the field.
Very nice to now understand the history of the technology we used.
Thanks for posting this fascinating story! While the geniuses at Dartmouth were creating BASIC I was struggling with FORTRAN as a freshman at the University of Washington: my final grade was a D or F. That was the end of computing for me until the mid-80s, when at work I was exposed to a DEC mini-computer with "dumb" terminals and a version of BASIC. I loved it and won a cost-saving award for writing a BASIC program that automated part of a process I used. That led in time to programming in dBASE, Word for DOS, and Visual BASIC for Applications. To this day I use VBA macros for personal stuff.
Without the groundbreaking work of good folks at Dartmouth my success would not have been possible. Thanks, gentlemen!
I enjoyed every minute of this wonderful story of BASIC. It's so nice to hear it from the people who were there. Very VERY nicely done! Thank you so much for sharing this!
I absolutely loved Basic when I was 11 in 1985. My school had a classroom full of BBC Micros and it felt so wonderful in there - the clacking keys, the flick of floppy lock switches, the groans of frustration and the cheers of success. I didn't get very far before I discovered guitars and music technology but my basic understanding of coding has really been a benefit in my life. I'm very grateful to the computer teacher, Mr Claytor who was so enthusiastic, kind, humorous and welcoming - a true teacher!
What a wonderful video. The combination of story, storytelling, and visuals was perfect. Thank you. ❤
Growing up in a poor family I would never have encountered a computer. In elementary school in the early 80s there was a computer and I recall there being a couple games and BASIC. all the students around me were very interested in the games but I remember only caring about BASIC it just seemed like a blank canvas where you could do anything. Years later my older sister took a job with a company that wrote software and she would let me come to work with her and play around with BASIC. I recall that summer writing a choose your own adventure story and carrying it around with me on a floppy and nowhere to run it until a day when I met a guy who was a math professor and I told him about how much I loved BASIC, He seemed moved by my story and gave me a really low end PC and set me loose giving me instruction anytime I needed help. From that day on I wrote code every day like an obsession. Every crappy job I had from then on would get a program from me to help with the job even if they didn't want it. One day I wrote an app and later discovered that the company had a multi-million dollar contract with a software company to create the same app. When they discovered that I had completed it ahead of the company and actually had a better product they fired the company and hired me as their developer. They got sued for breaking the contract and paid fines and yet told me it was all worth it for having found me. From that day I have been a full time developer, lead developer, IT Director and general nerd and I owe it all to being introduced to BASIC. Thank you Dartmouth.
Wow, awesome story! ❤
The kids today are amazed when an old person can figure out how to use a smart phone. They don't know who actually invented computers. It was these old people.
KameraShy And everyone after them. Computers have evolved tremendously, and Gen-Zers have no clue about this. They are too busy playing games, which in themselves have evolved tremendously. I agree with +Dawaleeb Alhawa that if you take away their GUI, they are about as useless as they are anyway. I asked one the other day if he knew what a GUI was. He said it was something involving sex.
John Kemeny was a 27-year old full professor at Dartmouth in 1953 and it was the 20-year old undegrad students who went on to create the computer industry.
I have said this so many times. I am almost 72 now but I used to write Adventure Games for the Commodore 64 and Amiga computers as well as the Amstrad CPC464 and 6128 back in 1985/6. I now teach and am amazed at how computer ILLITERATE most young people are.
@@oc2phish07 They think that because they can swipe left and right that they know CS.
@@American-Motors-Corporation Oh, ok Greta!
Thank you John Kemeny. Because of you I learned basic as a high school sophomore in 1971. Because of you I had a wonderful and fulfilling career. One never knows whose lives they will touch.
Love this story. It is not just about the development of Basic and computing and how it affected the students and the country and the world, but the human story that made it happen.
I had a TRS80 model 1 in 1985-6 that supported BASIC. I built it from parts found at the Radio Shack surplus store. I was 16 and learned quite a lot before the power supply shorted sending 110v AC through the whole system! BASIC was the root of my programming knowledge and it will always have a special place in my memories.
23:28 actually teared up a little bit at how excited the guy was. He was explaining it as if he was really reliving the moment
my Dad was that way when talking about assembler...and learning COBOL from (then) Commander Hopper...
@@JamesAllmond wow. Just wow.
What an amazing video. We used to use an acoustic couple 110/300 baud landline from a teletype to a number of computers in the Phoenix area in the mid 70s when I was in high school. One of those was a Honeywell GCOS system. Honeywell had bought GE's computer division there, the same building shown in the video here. They also sponsored an Explorer post (414) in computer science, which met for some years in that building. I knew Dartmouth had developed time sharing systems, but I never looked into the history of that. This really is amazing and shows the sharp contrast between 'batch' and time sharing and some of the divisions in the computer folks at the time. Honeywell had a process control division as well, and that got me into my career path of many years. Computers built to control or monitor processes, such a nuclear power plants or oil refineries. Amazing how much times have changed from those one word memory boards.
I did my first BASIC programming on an IBM 360 mainframe that I never actually saw. It was located at SUNY Buffalo, and I was in high school in a small town in Northern New York State connected by a phone line with a 300 baud modem. But I LOVED being able to actually make a computer do what I told it to do. It began my love for technology that I turned into a life-long career. Thank you, pioneers in BASIC! 🙂
What a beautiful video of such an interesting story. For those who grew up with computers in the 80s, BASIC was a given. It just came with every computer. Learning the history of how it was made makes a great language into something special.
Yup, and thanks to Bill Gates who did the ROM for those BASICs too.
I am from Australia. I started with Multi User BASIC on Data General computers. When Windows was spreading, I used Visual Basic 1.0 through 6.x. Among other things, I developed a software product for monitoring licensing of Windows applications. That software was sold to Tally Systems, of Hanover, MA, a few miles down the road from Dartmouth College which by chance I visited one day. I never knew BASIC was born there. Fascinating documentary. Thank you to all those pioneers. Yes, the journey really was fun!
I learnt BASIC on the BBC Micro (Model B) in grade 8 in 1988 while I was studying at New Era High School, a boarding school at Panchgani, a small hill-station near Pune (India). The school had set up a computer lab in partnership with a Bombay firm. I think I was very fortunate to get introduced to computer programming as a middle school student and BASIC felt very natural from the outset. There was no editor to learn. You entered the REPL directly and used line numbers to code your program, re-entering them if you wanted to edit a line. Simply brilliant! Our computer lab had its own library which contained many great books and I vividly remember learning stuff that wasn't being taught in the class, even learning 6502 assembly! BASIC programming had soon became my passion. The satisfaction of completing a program and watching it run and unfold as you had intended cannot be put in to words. I learned so much just copying program listings from books and magazines and modifying them. When the lab got a dot-matrix printer, I read the manual cover-to-cover, got its graphics printing working and went wild writing screen-dumps and lots of programs for the printer along with many games. BASIC definitely changed my life for I would later choose a career in computers and programming over inheriting my father's manufacturing business as a young graduate. Thank you for sharing this story.
BASIC in 1988 is what got me started in what later became a 25+ year career. All because of a Commodore64 SX60 that came with BASIC compiler and manuals. There was no networking I was on my own.
With all its drawbacks, BASIC was (and perhaps still is) a great language for introducing people to computing. It was the first language I was taught at school in 1985, and we did practice on Commodore PET, C-64 and TI-99/4A, all fitted with ROM BASIC.
Sometime later, out of curiosity about computers, I got a (photo) copy of "Basic Programming", by no others than Kurtz and Kemeny!! It is amazing to know their story!
A great thank you to the people of Dartmouth for making and posting this video.
The 1st PC folks at the papermill stayed up working on typing for hours BASIC programs into essentially very little powered PCs,IBM. Storage was 360 51/4 floppies if you could get it,so small if you forgot and turned off machine all you typed was gone, if you forgot to save it
BUT they had miney to buy machines since Unions bargained for wages increases annually minimuk wage was $3.15/hr Papermill was $6,50 something.
Python is a better introduction to programming these days and it's widely used across the board.
Please, no. BASIC still is, and has always been, the best way to cripple young minds and forge bad programmers. Your teachers in '85 could have known better: Pascal, Smalltalk, ML, Prolog (to name just a few) would have made your first approach to computing much more rewarding and fascinating. Trust me...
@@marcofaustinelli7010 "Please, no. BASIC still is, and has always been, the best way to cripple young minds and forge bad programmers." Is there any real evidence for this claim?
@@brdrnda3805 I would guess absolutely none whatsoever. Anybody can program crap in any language.
I would *love* to see a movie made about Kemeny. What a great story.
I took my first computer course in 1987. The class was full of 1st-year computer science students, but I took BASIC as an elective as a senior. Many of the students thought they wanted to "do computers." You don't "do computers" any more than a carpenter "does hammers." The class thinned out heavily after the first couple of coding exercises. BASIC was a tremendous first filter.
Absolutely love this this history. Basic was the first programming language I learned. I have dabbled in 3 others but always come back to a version of Basic. It’s simplicity is unmatched. Thanks to all the folks that made this RUclips video available.
When Universities were real institutions of learning and not credential cash registers....
Amen!
I mean, people like to shit on Universities, and it's true, the financial burden for students right now is *insane* and we need to make college as cheap or free as it used to be back then. However, having said that, we still have amazing Universities in the United States doing incredible work. To take one example, my alma mater, the University Of Washington, does most of the deep R&D that ends up going into Microsoft products (and of course the rest of the world too), particularly in advanced techniques like A.I. When I was going there, MS was funding something like 10 or more such research projects at once. A LOT of the stuff being used right now today in computing happened right there, and the spirit of it was similar to the spirit of this. In fact, we have some really incredible programs on campuses right now and probably more of them, by far, than we did back then.
Having said that, I think that MOST people would be better served by Online courses today for basic undergraduate studies, if they are not into research and academics. Online courses are finally getting amazing now because they hire the very best professors and masters in the world and can deploy their lectures all over the world for years. It's a lot harder to get the very best in the world at your particular college, unless you happen to be going to Stanford, MIT, or somewhere like that. Online, you can find the very best in each subject no matter what, without regards to geography. Plus, you get to learn at your own pace, rewind and pause the lectures, and so forth and so on.
For those who want to live the academic lifestyle permanently, there's nothing better than a physical campus. And honestly, that's one of the very best lifestyles in general if you're a nerd. A good campus feels like an amazing place to be and make school actually fun and fulfilling. And if you want to permanently be surrounded by other intellectual (aka non-idiotic) human beings, that's one of the very best ways to do it. And then you usually just become a professor or something so you can make money going to school instead of losing money going to school.
@@think2086 Let me know your position when you have worked in one as an academic for 25 years. I cannot speak to the US experience.
Like everything else it is politics ruining Universities, You will learn a lot at a university and apply it if that’s your desire.
Yes people buying degrees need to be stopped. Again many politicians do for them and their children.
I owe $35,000+ for TWO YEARS of a university that offered a "Web Commerce" degree in the late 1990's. I didn't know any better. In those two years I really learned very little. The instructors, as I would later come to find out, were career rejects and business "crossovers" trying to teach IT courses. I will never be able to pay off that loan because I don't work in the IT field (not enough education or any certs to speak of), I am stuck working in the freight industry tying down and transporting cargo with a forklift. It's sad :(
10 Cls
20 Print "Thanks "
30 Goto 20
Had all the stores wondering... boans never knew what this ugly bastard was up to, ogling their fancy machines.
Add a ; at the end of line 20 and fill the screen
You can't clear the screen on a teletype!
@@RolandHutchinson true that...but i learned on punch cards, and they would clear themselves when the card reader freaked...ahh, the painful old days...
40 REM once learnt never forgotten even after fifty years
Wonderful video. I started programming in BASIC on a timeshared HP2000 machine in 1972 in high school. My first class taught that BASIC was invented by Kemeny and Kurtz, but I never knew more about who they were or how that happened until now. This video brought back the excitement of those early days, though I have since received a PhD in CS and worked at national research laboratories. It has also given me new drive to complete my current research. Thank you for this.
Myself as well, starting in 72 in 8th grade for me. HP Timeshare BASIC, on a HP-2000 va teletype and acoustic modem. TIES was that one. I also had numbers and (‘borrowed’) credentials for access to MECC and MERITS, also timeshare basic OS ..
Ah the days of leaving the punch tape turned on to steal credentials
First up the music was great. I went to year 11 and 12 high school in Tasmania, Australia, 1974-75. We had teletype consoles, and stored our programs on punched tape. Our school was connected via telephone lines to a central computer about 300 kilometres away. We learnt basic. Great documentary. John Kemeny must have been an exceptional individual.
I programmed in BASIC using a dumb terminal via an acoustic coupler in 1969 when I was 14 years old. To save your work we used a paper tape. It has been amazing to see the entire computing revolution from the very beginning to the present time.
Same here in '71 high school. Used a teletype terminal with acoustic coupler + paper tape
Ditto. Inside the punch tape units was a 256 bit core memory. One of ours was broken. I took it apart, found the broken wire, added a short fine wire and soldered it. Fixed. Gee, I think that makes me old, having actually seen, handled and repaired core memory. Lol.
What a delightful trip down memory lane. I started work at NOAA in 1974 as a cartographer. Pen and ink were still mainstays of this craft but I could see limitless improvements were possible if we could get the primitive computers we had to do the drawing. Much of the task involved insuring every dot on a piece of paper had a geographic co-ordinate. Fortran, despite it's problems, was the tool we used. Thousands of IBM punch cards, countless hours waiting for computed results, and then the joy of realizing we had a digital record that would never disappear and could be used generations later. Those were good old days which I had forgotten about until watching this video. Thankyou. I now live way out in the boonies where the cost of truck fuel or firewood is a major topic of daily discussion. Were I to attempt drawing any of the folk out here into a discussion about those past days it would soon end in blank stares.
What a wonderful tribute. BASIC is how I started learning at the dawn of the PC age, and although I quickly moved on to other languages, I never really appreciated just how much it contributed to computing until now. Thanks so much!
When we recruit students from high schools for universities instead of athletes, we get results.
Many of those “scholar-athletes” in football and basketball never even complete their degree. Meanwhile, a serious student falls into student debt hell.
exact, just point the main failure
Indeed, sir!
I think most of us who had computers like the ZX81 or BBC computers taught ourselves
a little about Basic. Something mostly lacking today.
What an inspiring and uplifting story of Kemeny and the extra smart students he encouraged and fostered. I remember learning Fortran, then Algol - then there was Basic whose simplicity confused me. How could something so simple be capable enough to produce wonder? Eventually I studied Assembler, one step up from computer language, and my joy was complete!
This was an AMAZING watch. Thanks for uploading this Gem
Great video! I am a retired engineer, but hadn’t heard all of this early Basic development history.
Took my 1st college pgm’ing class in 71 (FORTRAN). Learned Basic in 74 & many other languages over my career. I’m fortunate to have seen the evolution of computers & operation systems from the IBM 360 to the modern day computer.😎👍
I was a young newlywed of modest means when I bought a TI 9/4A at the fire sale price of $40 in 1983.
The package included a three ring binder with a programmer’s reference to TI‘s version of the Basic language. I studied that thing so carefully and I reproduced the version of an Apple computer program that I found in a magazine to run on the TI.
I learned a lot of great programming concepts that transferred directly to other languages later on.
I’m grateful, too.
At the Case Institute of Technology in the fall of 1961 a required freshman course was titled 'Introduction to Numerical Analysis' taught by professor Fred Way. It was a course in computer programming using the language Algol. In March, 1984 IBM produced the IBM PC Jr. which came with a Basic module. I remember seeing Basic code and thinking, "Wow, that looks like Algol!" If you knew Algol, learning Basic was a snap. God bless everyone involved!
watching these documentaries on old school computing is great motivation for doing my programming homework. Now, back to those problems on inheritance and polymorphism....
This is a loving portrayal. Thanks for sharing this history with us.
Thank you for this wonderful documentary on BASIC. I started programming in BASIC when I was 6 or 7 on a second-hand ZX81 in the early 1980s, thanks to Sir Clive Sinclair's computer and Dartmouth's BASIC.
Great story.
BASIC was my first programming language in late 80's Australia.
At age 8, I can confirm that it's very easy to understand; important for wide adoption by non-technical users, which is the key to 'crossing the chasm' to use a marketing term.
I love that the font used throughout this is from the Teletype ASR-33. I hate that I'm old enough to recognize that fact.
And my first programming exposure was to CINET BASIC on a PDP 8/e, using an ASR-33 Teletype.
Getting old is sad however you should consider the alternative, my friend!
Thank you so much for uploading this amazing documentary
I started out with BASIC all by myself around 33 years ago. I didn’t know the language’s history, somehow I thought that it was credited to Bill Gates. Thank you for giving us this beautiful lesson on its real beginnings. Thank you, Professors Kemeny and Kurtz🙏. Much respect to Dartmouth.
Watching this took me back in time to 1981, which was when I took a "Computer Math" course in high school. We learned to program in BASIC on an Exidy Sorcerer followed by several Commodore Pet models. All of this led to an addiction to programming a great career in software engineering and IT management roles. I found this documentary to be very nostalgic and surprised at how far BASIC and computing advanced in a span of less than 20 years from the creation of BASIC to when I starting writing my first BASIC programs. Thank you for this video.
Fantastic. Having used BASIC on many machines in my early days, this brought back so many happy memories. A treat to see how it all started!
As a kid, I first learned to program in BASIC on a Commodore PET - the first model PET with the 'chicklet' keyboard. And I followed this up with a fantastic career as a Computer Engineer.
If I saw that old model PET again I would run over to it and hug it! 💖 No joke!
Fond memories.
My father was one of the earliest programmers having been employed by a management consulting firm (Towers Perrin) in the late '50s and used to take us to the office on weekends--we would play on the punch card machines while he did his programming and compiling. He had started in the mail room and learned computing on the job. I remember how excited he was when they eventually got the IBM 360/370. My personal experience came in '74 at Case Western Reserve, programming in Algol on the Univac Chi 1108. I actually learned Algol before BASIC, which I didn't learn until getting into personal computers. I didn't find Algol all that difficult--it just didn't use enough English language words and syntax to appear as friendly to the average person.
When my grandfather tried to get me interested in BASIC in the early 90's, I had't realised how big a piece of history it was. Later, I unfortunately didn't have the time to get into and appreciate this piece of history. Now that I do, I wish he were still there with me to share this exploration from the past, he had so much academic experience in physics and computing from that era. I miss him.
.
Early 90s? Didn't FORTRAN replace basic by then?
@@B_Bodziak Not entirely sure what you mean by your question, BASIC was still very much in use in the early 90, though its popularity had begun to wane. BASIC and Pascal were what my grandpa used to use so I don't see why he would teach me anything else, with all the resources (software, hardware and documentation) he had on hand. Also the most recent release of Chipmunk Basic, the BASIC interpreter he provided me with, was released in 2019, so it's still not quite dead yet.
A great video. The Dartmouth system also benefited high school students (like me in Exeter, NH) via a remote connection. I still have the original Basic manual and a printout of my first program in 1969.
I was writing BASIC programs at Lindsay Place High School in Pointe Claire, a suburb of Montreal, in 1973. We used the same sort of acoustic coupler modem, and ASR 33 teletype. It was GLORIOUS! Thank you for this wonderful history. I'm still writing programs, now for a living, but have moved on to JavaScript and web development. Even back at LPHS we knew BASIC came from Dartmouth.
A very rewarding introduction to basic in human emotional terms. I needed this back story to understand the people involved and the reality of pushing information into our time. Thanks
I learned BASIC in school, maybe around 1989. It was pretty outdated already, but fascinating for me. I then got a home computer with DOS 5 with QBasic, which was a revelation - functions, loops, multiline IFs - at that point I learned to create my favourite handlend games on my computer, and became really passionate about programming. Never looked back!
I was writing BASIC with my dad as a young girl, and found that great, my interest in computertechnology was from that moment upthere.
Time-sharing excellent explanation, thanks and kind regards.
Wow this really takes me back. I started learning computing back in 1962/3 on a Ferranti Pegasus. The original machine is in the Science Museum in South Kensington in London UK. Input was on punched cards, output on punched paper tape which you then fed through a reader and it was printed using a teletype. This was at Brooklands Technical College, in Weybridge, Surrey.
I started learning BASIC in 1985, and never stopped ever since. This movie brought to light the story and the humane side of it all, since its beginnings. Great watch!
Great documentary and very informative! I missed basic basic but did mess around as a kid on a 386/SLC33 using MS-Basic. I then went on to run a BBS for close to 20 years writing several games for it and having an monthly active user list of 1600 people dialing in and did not before now know where that load sharing capabilities came from. Thank to all these early Pioneers for giving me the opportunities I was able to enjoy. Good work!
In the late 60s I used the Dartmouth time sharing computer via TWX (teletype) machines at GE TEMPO in Santa Barbara, California. I used both Algol and Basic. The only glitch we had was often we would get a busy signal when we dialed in to the Dartmouth machine. The glitch was that the modem at the Darmouth end would not hang up correctly after a previous user disconnected. The solution was that Dartmount gave us the phone number of the operators so we could call them to get the modem ready for a new call.
Founding fathers of Basic. We appreciate you! Without you I'd have no RUclips channel where I discuss assembly language and C64 Basic, or even a website teaching programming.