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. ❤️
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.
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.
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.
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 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! :-))
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
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.
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.
Many of those “scholar-athletes” in football and basketball never even complete their degree. Meanwhile, a serious student falls into student debt hell.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am a millennial from India. I wrote my first BASIC code in the year 2000 at the age of 11 on an Intel pentium 4 processor computer. It was in the school curriculum. We missed COBOL and Fortran and went straight to C from BASIC. Then to C++ and to Java. Interestingly during my masters in VLSI in the year 2013, I learned about the Intel pentium 4 MIPS architecture. The same processor on which I wrote my first BASIC program.
@@RolandHutchinson true that...but i learned on punch cards, and they would clear themselves when the card reader freaked...ahh, the painful old days...
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.😎👍
My father pulled what I have come to call "the standard dad trick". I had pestered him a few times for a kit computer so we could build it together, but he flatly refused. At the beginning of Summer, 1979, he bought HIMSELF a TRS-80, model 1 level 1. I was not allowed to touch it. All I could do is watch while he used it. For a few nights at least, all I could do was drool and watch him learn how to program. Finally, he said I could try it but ONLY if he was present and I had to use my own tapes so as not to erase any of his. I started in and was mesmerized. For about 1-2 hours every evening, I would sit and learn how to program it in BASIC. Then reluctantly release it to him so he could put an hour in on his own. I don't know when it happened exactly; but soon, I was allowed to use it whenever I wanted to. I would start in the early after noon (summertime) work up until supper, then another 3 - 4 hours in the evening. After a few months, my father asked me to move it off his desk... over to MY desk!!! The significance of this was lost on me at the time. But his objective was accomplished. He knew I was hooked. Many years later he revealed why he never bought the kit computer. He had heard stories of people buying and trying to assemble them only to fail, become frustrated at the difficulties and expense and abandon the hobby. He wasn't sure HE could assemble it let alone what my solder joints would look like. And he didn't want my first attempt with computers to be frustrating. That's why he bought a fully assembled and tested computer from Radio Shack.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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!
I was a HHS student, 1966-69, and was bitten by DTSS as others at that time. It created the foundation for my career in software. Thank you J.G. Kemeny and T. Kurtz for thinking outside the box and allowing we locals access to the Kiewit Computer Center and summer jobs programming for different Dartmouth departments.
1987 14 y/o programming in BASIC in an Atari 800XL while listening to The Cure....good times.. if really affected my learning and understanding of technology and software for years to come...I'm now a creative director at a global tech company. Thank you to all that made it possible.
I learned BASIC using a Sinclair 2000 in the early 80s copying programs from magazines. While I never went into the IT field, it was that that sparked my love of computing for fun which continues today at 52 using Linux. I still remember our first high school Understanding BASIC class.
How exciting and heady to be involved with the creation of a language and, more importantly, the timesharing system that made it possible to be used so widely. These people are the giants whose shoulders we stand on today.
My history with BASIC was as a high school student in 1970. A teletype ASR-33 was installed in a large closet in our high school. We would be in that room till all hours of the night, till the janitor would kick us out around midnight. Fun Times.
I learned BASIC when I bought my first computer, a Radio Shack Color Computer 2. I started with 4K, and in three days wrote a program that was larger, I kept expanding to 16 K and eventually 64 k and then bank switching to 128K. My first dial-up baud modem was 300. I could read it as it was being transmitted. I learned how to set up a bulletin board (BBS). I did not know until watching this video how BASIC was created. I used punch cards in College at ODU (Old Dominion University-1979) to write programs with Fortran. Computers have come a long way since then. It is amazing to learn of the birth of BASIC language and the desire to make computers accessible to everyone. Thank you for this incredible piece of history. Shalom(Peace)
Basic was my first programming language as it was taught to us in 5th grade. that was almost 10 years ago and most of my friends (who shared the same class) forgot it, but still basic remains fresh in my mind.
I learned BASIC when I attended Indiana University at the East campus, in Richmond, IN, during the summer of 1981. This was between 11th and 12th grade. I used a 300 baud modem with my TRS-80 Model 1 to do my subsequent 😢programming classes after I decided the computer field was for me. I've been in IT now over 40 years, with the last 33 yrs as a DBA ( Database Administrator ) working primarily with Oracle, but other DBMS's as well. Thanks to Dartmouth for developing BASIC, otherwise who knows what my career path wold have been.
My first introduction to BASIC was Microsoft's Level II BASIC for Tandy's TRS-80 computers. All in all, it was one of the better implementations of BASIC for Z-80 based computers. At that time, most of my programs were loaded or saved to cassette tapes.
Bilal Heuser . I had a Vic 20 with a tape drive. Entered the programs from a book and then had to debug them! We had TRS 80s and PETs in industrial arts and Apple 2s in a computer lab at HS. Friends dad had an IBM 5150 he let us play with DOS commands on. Good times!
Mine was The Coco. It was not until the vic-20 did I get assembler around my head but when I did..... all other processors were cake. So basic was the key for me.
I've been in programming since 1978 - went into university and have been at it ever since. So, I was born right about the start of this and being a history buff I have really enjoyed this history. Amazing stuff. In 2005 I met an elderly gentleman who had worked on ENIAC, when it was still at the university! He had gone on to work with IBM on the Sage air defense systems, specializing on user interfaces. He had two patents that had only recently been declassified. Amazing, to meet one of the very early pioneers of the industry - still alive. Unfortunately, like a moron, I did not get his name!
Thanks for all your work. I learned BASIC when I was a kid, with my father (my hero), using a brasilian Sharp/Epcom Hotbit, a MSX machine. I have no words to thank you all. God bless!
I have fond memories of being introduced to an IBM version of BASIC in 1971 as a sophomore in high school in Oregon, which we used via a Teletype Model 33 accessing a time-share computer. I was soon writing all sorts of silly programs, such as one that played Solitaire with itself....you just sat there and watched it win or lose. The following year they changed the computer to a Hewlett Packard 2000, and when we got upgraded to 32K of storage space I thought "Wow! Look at what we can do with this." I was making wordsearch puzzles and having it compose ridiculous Haiku poetry, along with a chat program to talk to other schools. It was endless enjoyment for a small number of nerds in the schools. One of the imported games was a version of Qubic. At first it seemed to be unbeatable, but then I found a loophole, one move early on that it had a blind spot for, and I could always win after that. In 1975 at a community college, they had a version of BASIC on a computer that was still using punched cards, so I punched in a maze program and generated mazes on their lineprinter that were sometimes six feet long. Too much fun.
This is an impressive story. I cut my teeth on BASIC. I couldn't fit the computer class into my class schedule so the Biology dept. said If I wrote some programs for them, they would let me skip the class. I had so much fun I would forget to eat! One problem I had was, if I did too much compiling of the code I wrote, they would put me on a low priority level, the computer would then stop working for me and I had to do something else.
I was surprised to learn that the "John G. Kemeny" associated with BASIC was the same associated with the "Kemeny Report" about what went wrong at Three Mile Island
I learned it in 1979-1980 using the "BASIC Programming" cartridge for my Atari 2600. I ended up buying Commodore 16, then Commodore 64/128. Later bought an XT in college and enjoyed GWBASIC, QuickBasic 4.5, Professional Development System 7.1 and then Visual Basic 1.0, etc. These were amazing years to be alive, I wrote many BBS's and made a ton of friends who I collaborated on development projects with.
Around 1970 I was using a timeshare system for simulating electronic circuits - all input and output by teletype. The timeshare company also installed a BASIC compiler. To run it you typed: BASIC and the response came back: BASIC FOR HELP TYPE HELP but every time you typed HELP the computer would always, without fail, respond: I'M SORRY I CANNOT HELP YOU From that time on I was in love with computers!
As a Dartmouth undergrad from 1968-1972, I distinctly remember a couple of classmates who were in the Kiewit Computer center courtesy of a certain social science course that they were then taking. I don't recall the exact course, but their homework assignment involved their short answers to a series of questions on their required reading. It was a written quiz, of sorts. The program was written to respond with short phrases either congratulating them for a correct answer or informing them that their answer was incorrect and encouraging them to "try again". I was sitting nearby when one of my friends suddenly burst out laughing, LOUDLY! I asked him what was going on. He showed me: After a series of unsuccessful answers to one question, he had gotten so frustrated that he had typed "F___ you!" as his response. Reflexively, , the timeshare terminal typed back to him, "F___ you, too!" Just one more reason I loved my years at Dartmouth.
Started programming in Basic on a Casio PB 100 with 1 KB ram and 2 lines of LCD screens. For Christmas I was given the module to add a second Kilobyte (spaces DID count as 1 byte). Then at school there was an Apple IIe. I learned by copying programs from an italian magazine, there was no printer then. Finally, my parents bought me an Apple IIc then upgraded to Apple IIGS. Basic and ProDOS were just amazing. AppleWorks... the Beagle Bros software utils. Amazing. Then came the Mac and I moved to DOS... Basic is great and I appreciate now how powerful Python is.
I bought a Commodore PET in the Summer of 1981 with money I had saved working as a dishwasher and janitor at my junior high school. I had learned BASIC from the back of Frank Herbert's book Without Me You're Nothing and spent the summer writing games like the ones I had seen on the PLATO System in the library of the local junior college. It was the best summer of my childhood. Thank you John Kemeny !
I wish that I had been a little older and could have attended Dartmouth College. I was only eight years old at the time. However, when I was 12 years old in 1968, my father let me program the IBM 1401 Southwestern Bell Telephone in St Louis. That was the joys of Fortran.
My Main Frame computer use started in the late '60s while still in HS. There was a group of us Physics students who along with our teacher had a once per week 3 hr. night time block on the School District's machine. It was always completely shut down before we arrived. We would have to power up the machine, run our bootstrap load & Go card through the card reader to start the minimum processes. Then key in at the console the instructions to load the main operating system and our desired compilers from tape. We then spent the rest of our time block submitting our card decks and collecting our printed output. I had a separate arrangement with the head of the Computer Center where 3 times a week during the 30 minutes they were at lunch I would have free use of the machine for my personal COBOL project. What was really wild by today's standards is their scrap printer paper that we used for our night time sessions had the source code for the school district's payroll system on it. I was able to obtain enough printout to start self-teaching myself COBOL. After I started my lunch time sessions that year the Computer Center would give me their outdated programming and operating systems manuals whenever there was a software upgrade. At that time Honeywell was putting out upgrades for one software product or another about every quarter. Sometimes Assembly, sometime COBOL, etc. Unlike IBM, Honeywell at that time was giving their manuals free of charge, if you could show that you owned a previous version. So while in College I could go to the local Honeywell Office and get updates on my manuals.
I started to watch another Basic language 'nostalgic' UA-cam video, they showed a couple of B&W photos of the DTSS days and then said something about "but it really began when Bill Gates..." Thanks for posting this video.
Thanks for a fascinating video. I graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1966. There I learned Fortran and ran it through punch cards on an IBM 360 (I believe). It was not until the mid-1980s that I got my own PC and learned PC BASIC. Having lived through this time period, this gives me insights I did not have before this video. Thanks again.
First used basic in about 1971. Somehow got some time on a TTY at the local library, with a school mate whose dad was a big chief at ICL (International Computers and Tabulators, later to become ICL) in Stevenage (England). Doing A level maths, I was understandably blown away when I was able to write basic code that solved any quadratic including giving complex roots .... never ever forgot those few hours that evening and have grown up using computers all my life (now 68), mostly for serious investigations and teaching aids, rarely for games (except online chess!). Kemeny's words about the potential pitfalls of computers were so prophetic .. a man who absolutely understood the future.
The programming skills I learned on the TI 99/4A got a great job working for the Army doing automated testing. My son took an interest later in life and became the developer of Hyperspin.
I studied Structured Basic at Dartmouth in the early 80s with Kemeny as my prof (he was also Dartmouth's president at the time.) He cut quite a figure, always in a tweed jacket and tie, smoking cigarettes with a black holder in class. I got an A on my final project, a game of five-on-five Ultimate Frisbee that you played against the computer, all ASCII graphics.
I was using the GE Timesharing with BASIC as a freshman at my high school in 1969. We had an ASR33 teletype with a 110 baud phone modem. We would write the text for BASIC programs during the day and print out the program text on a paper tape. At night when it was cheaper, a student on a work scholarship would run those paper tapes through the timeshare system to get the output. They would paper clip the paper output to the paper tape. Next day, we would see what we got. We did that for two years, then we got timeshare BASIC from a local college. We could use that realtime during the day on the teletype.
War Hammer, I don't know of a UA-cam video that has his entire speech, but Kemeny looks into the future in his book mentioned in this video by his daughter, Jennifer I think. The book is "Man and the Computer", available on Ebay and/or Amazon. I have a copy and it is very insightful. The man was a genius.
I started computing in 75 added basic in 76 added Fortran IV soon afterwards. I ran TTY ASR33 and finally got a Tube. I had several of those. I had a Queme Printer - a 132 column daisy wheel printer that a news paper was published on. I was doing Bio Rhythms and Book library listing to say the least. Charter in North Texas Computer Society. It was College students, professors, I was one of the latter and all sorts of others in sheet metal companies. Floppies were 8" Hard sector (get more bits on than Soft sector). Fun days in computing.
I once wrote a trivial BASIC program on the GE TTY at AZ State U where my father was Prof of Mathematics. I still hve the BASIC October 1964 manual we used then.
Playing a computer game before they were connected to displays, where everything was printed, must have consumed VAST quantities of paper! Still, I imagine it was a very exciting time, when people involved were watching the technology expand and improve by leaps and bounds. To look at where we are now, it's hard to believe that that computer was $300,000 and was VERY slow. One of the very best improvements that has ever been made to the BASIC language, if you ask me, is the removal of line numbers. I used to hate having to mess with that and renumbering if you needed to insert a section of code. With the addition of labels (and function calls) it allowed BASIC to stay as neat as possible.
Great story, I had no idea of all this background. To think that in order to use a computer, you first had to write an operating system. This would never be considered today. I remember wanting to build my own computer using Heathkit parts and a TV studio monitor. Much was needed in electronics design including an interface from the computer to the monitor providing a character generator. And of course, being on a tight budget, memory storage was a cassette tape drive. It never worked very well and you prayed there would be no power failure when saving a program. My first full computer system, was a Kaypro, luggable, followed by an AT&T PC 6300, with floppy discs. Boy was it fast!
Started programming on time-share in high school - basic of course - in 79. Wrote a moon lander program, program to make banners, tic-tac-toe etc. Maybe i was using some version of Dartmouth's time share. Went to college - got a Commodore 64 for home use, then a MS-DOS PC 8086 clone .. nearly 40 years later i'm doing C++, C# and Java on Windows and Linux. Made a great living at it. Born in a lucky time I guess. So Thanks Kemeny !
The first code I wrote was some very simple Apple Basic programs in 6th grade. In high school, I dabbled with QuickBasic. Of course, I moved on to other languages after that, and have been writing C++ for a living for a couple of decades. Basic isn't my favorite language, but my life would very likely be quite different had I not been introduced to Basic in school.
I wrote my first basic program in 1970 in high school. We had a punch tape teletype to submit our programs. So the timesharing had already spread nationwide.
My first brush with basic was in 1987 whit a sony pocket computer/scientific calculator, came with a book on how to use basic. Pretty fun and eye opening about where life would go. This was back in El Salvador when I was a student at UCA. I still have the computer and book.
The joy of BASIC was to learn the concepts of solid programming, including using teams to write subroutines to a Nassi-Schneiderman diagram. Great days.
ahh waterloo BASIC is what i learned in highschool ... at home I did 68k programming on my vic-20 ... even networked that to 2 c64's and 2 printers and 2 hard drives PLUS a fax machine ... it was great fun ... .learned fortran fortran 77, C C+, C++ turbo C ... Turbo C++ Pascal CPM .. assembler 68k assembly ... funniest part I learned these in high school when I was in college it was my highschool courses all over again ... drove the teachers nuts pointing out the text books errors because they didnt BOTHER to check the programs ... the dean forced my comp sci teacher to give me an A+ ... since I literally proved his teaching method faulty and his book teachings inadequate ... and even showed them the same book he was using from my highschool ... and all the exact same assignments ... that teacher never liked me after that ... even my 68k assmebler teacher hated me because I flew through the years assignments in a week ... so he kept changing them ... the dean stopped that too .... I would have gotten exemptions but we were allowed 3 per semester and I had maxed those on other courses ...
I learned BASIC on one of these systems at my high school in Oklahoma City in the mid-70's. It was my first exposure to computing and programming. That's why I'm in computing. Incidentally, Dartmouth College was founded by my ancestor Eleazar Wheelock. So, I can say that he's reason I'm in computing, today.
I learned how to program at the age of 12 in 1988. The system was the Atari XE. The language? BASIC. I didn't get the system for programming, in fact I had no idea that was a thing on this system. But it came with a very large book on how to program and I read it and learned it. My dad, who was an Electrical Engineer, was absolutely thrilled because he learned BASIC as an undergrad at the University of Cincinnati back in 1971-ish. So for a brief period, we had loads of fun programming together in the late 80s. Its really a shame I didn't stick with it. Maybe I could be a multi-millionaire in Silicon Valley or something.
"Basic Programing with an Introduction to Logic". A class I took at Grand Blanc High in Michigan in '77. A few years later, it got me a good job at my company. There were maybe 3 people with computer experience. Accounting, Engineering, and me.
My computer career began in 1962, I was 20. My first experience was on a Univac SS80, that did not even use conventional binary or more correctly BCD. It used a form of binary called BIQUINARY that had a numerical sequence of 1,2,4,5 NOT 1,2,4,8. It used a 40 bit word composed of 10 characters of 4 bits each. Because BIQUINARY did not have sufficient space to encode alphabetic characters it was necessary to use use 2 40 bit words and the hardware would combine 4 bits from one word with 4 bits from the corresponding word to encode or decode a full set of characters. Oh and to make things worse there was NO static memory all data and program code was stored on a magnetic drum and had to be transferred programmatically to a series of registers and then manipulated. To add 2 numbers together the operands would be transferred to the appropriate registers, added together with the result ending up in another register. That result would then have to be transferred back to a location on the drum. All of this had to be programmed using hard coded addresses of the drum locations. LOAD DRUM ADDRESS 5 TO REGISTER A LOAD DRUM ADDRESS 6 TO REGISTER B. ADD A TO B. TRANSFER THE CONTENTS OF REGISTER B TO DRUM ADDRESS 7. These commands would be written in BIQUINARY code, my use of the words ADD and LOAD are just for illustration. In machine language ALL those addresses had to be chosen by the programmer and you had to remember where you put the result so that you could use it later. Then we had a ASSEMBLER program in which we could write the command ADD and the assembler would translate that to the correct BIQUINARY COMMAND CODE. It also relieved you of the task of remembering DRUM ADDRESSES by using a variable name such as RESULT-A. Then there was the problem of remembering where the R/W heads were on the rotating drum and calculating if you could access data without having to wait and extra Revolution to access what you had stored in RESULT-A. But it was GREAT FUN and a challenge that we accepted and reveled in. Those were the days, today it is SO EASY all I have to do is say ALEXA BUY ME A NEW WALKING CANE and it arrives promptly from AMAZON. Just joking I have yet to need a cane, but my memory and mind are wearing out. My beloved granddaughter thinks that I am CRAZEEEE, at 15 she knows everything and has the sighing and rolling of the eyes down to perfection. But I adore her and her 9 year old brother, he still thinks that granddad is a genius.
I remember how I launched Reversi on my first personal computer, and could not believe that I was being beaten dry by an algorithm written in BASIC. It should be noted that the program thought about each move for a noticeably long time, but nevertheless. Then I realized that it doesn't matter how slow computers are now (this was 1988). If I can solve a problem using BASIC, then the problem is solved. So I came up with a way to debug programs: write a program in BASIC, debug it, and then translate it into Assembly. The next couple of days were spent writing the Auto Racing game. I invited my friends to play. At first they didn’t succeed, but pretty quickly they got used to it and became bored - nothing happened in the game. Making games is harder than I thought. But it was impossible to make a complex plot on that computer. So I wrote my next game on the IBM PC.
What they focused on and found revolutionary was later, with the home computer, becoming less important: sharing computers and remote calculations. Also with private phones, it's sort of less important. But with cloud computing, it has become very important again. My point is that this evolution wasn't/isn't linear, it's more circular.
We had timeshare access to an IBM 370 in 1975 as a high school student in far off St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada. It was the first time they had provided computer access to HS students and we learned Basic. We had a teletype in our physics class and, in the first year, we had access after school as part of a club. There was a second school in the city that also had access, but they weren't as keen as we were at mine. We burned through our allotted timeshare amount (mostly playing games...) fairly early in the semester, so we hacked the other schools password, started to burn through their time and continued on our merry way to the end of the term. Hackers in 1975 we were...
Man, this video took me back! While I was in high school in the 70s, I was one of those geeks carrying around punch cards and paper tapes in my backpack. Sometimes I had them spilling out into view. Nowadays, the geeks carry USB keys smaller than a thumbnail which can hold thousands or millions of times the data than those old storage media could handle. Also, I laughed aloud when I heard a program of 3000 plus lines called "big." Contrast a mere 3000 lines of code with the mega- and giga-line behemoths of today! Boggles the mind to consider!
My favorite command of years past on our HP-2000A: MAT A=ZER Made initializing easy especially when writing code on a noisy decwriter during math class!
Ooops... anyway, some fellow had set up a clunk, clunk, clunk teletype that output punched tape. We wrote a simple program and ran the tape back through and got the answer. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t impressed and said thanks, but no thanks. It was the time of the summer of love and my interests pointed decidedly toward art and music, my life career ended up in commercial photography. Life’s been good, but I can’t help being curious where I would have ended, if I could find the right ‘multi-verse’ version where I’d made a different choice
Comparable to many others, I started when I encountered very basic BASIC programming on a DEC PDP-11 in 1978 & went on to make a pretty useful 20 year career in IT. Until those jobs went to India, & I became a forklift operator until retirement. But my financial solvency/security & own home is attributable to it.
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. ❤️
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!
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.
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.
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.
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"!
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.
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.
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.
the audio story durring the credits shows what kind of a teacher Kemeny was, a true hero.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am a millennial from India. I wrote my first BASIC code in the year 2000 at the age of 11 on an Intel pentium 4 processor computer. It was in the school curriculum.
We missed COBOL and Fortran and went straight to C from BASIC. Then to C++ and to Java.
Interestingly during my masters in VLSI in the year 2013, I learned about the Intel pentium 4 MIPS architecture. The same processor on which I wrote my first BASIC program.
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
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 would *love* to see a movie made about Kemeny. What a great story.
My father pulled what I have come to call "the standard dad trick". I had pestered him a few times for a kit computer so we could build it together, but he flatly refused. At the beginning of Summer, 1979, he bought HIMSELF a TRS-80, model 1 level 1. I was not allowed to touch it. All I could do is watch while he used it. For a few nights at least, all I could do was drool and watch him learn how to program. Finally, he said I could try it but ONLY if he was present and I had to use my own tapes so as not to erase any of his. I started in and was mesmerized. For about 1-2 hours every evening, I would sit and learn how to program it in BASIC. Then reluctantly release it to him so he could put an hour in on his own. I don't know when it happened exactly; but soon, I was allowed to use it whenever I wanted to. I would start in the early after noon (summertime) work up until supper, then another 3 - 4 hours in the evening. After a few months, my father asked me to move it off his desk... over to MY desk!!! The significance of this was lost on me at the time. But his objective was accomplished. He knew I was hooked.
Many years later he revealed why he never bought the kit computer. He had heard stories of people buying and trying to assemble them only to fail, become frustrated at the difficulties and expense and abandon the hobby. He wasn't sure HE could assemble it let alone what my solder joints would look like. And he didn't want my first attempt with computers to be frustrating. That's why he bought a fully assembled and tested computer from Radio Shack.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
This is a loving portrayal. Thanks for sharing this history with us.
I was a HHS student, 1966-69, and was bitten by DTSS as others at that time. It created the foundation for my career in software. Thank you J.G. Kemeny and T. Kurtz for thinking outside the box and allowing we locals access to the Kiewit Computer Center and summer jobs programming for different Dartmouth departments.
1987 14 y/o programming in BASIC in an Atari 800XL while listening to The Cure....good times.. if really affected my learning and understanding of technology and software for years to come...I'm now a creative director at a global tech company. Thank you to all that made it possible.
I learned BASIC using a Sinclair 2000 in the early 80s copying programs from magazines. While I never went into the IT field, it was that that sparked my love of computing for fun which continues today at 52 using Linux. I still remember our first high school Understanding BASIC class.
How exciting and heady to be involved with the creation of a language and, more importantly, the timesharing system that made it possible to be used so widely. These people are the giants whose shoulders we stand on today.
I learned BASIC on a Data General Nova at Berzeliusskolan in Linköping,Sweden, 1979.
Nova 1200 here, loaded from tape, run in core.
@@GrahamDenison I guess that by "core" you mean magnetic core (RAM) memory?
(For the kids of today, "core" means processor :)
I learned Basic on an Apple.
@@SMunro I learned machine code and BASIC on a Luxor ABC 80 and a Sinclair ZX81.
Where are those companies now?
My history with BASIC was as a high school student in 1970. A teletype ASR-33 was installed in a large closet in our high school. We would be in that room till all hours of the night, till the janitor would kick us out around midnight. Fun Times.
I learned BASIC when I bought my first computer, a Radio Shack Color Computer 2. I started with 4K, and in three days wrote a program that was larger, I kept expanding to 16 K and eventually 64 k and then bank switching to 128K. My first dial-up baud modem was 300. I could read it as it was being transmitted. I learned how to set up a bulletin board (BBS). I did not know until watching this video how BASIC was created. I used punch cards in College at ODU (Old Dominion University-1979) to write programs with Fortran. Computers have come a long way since then. It is amazing to learn of the birth of BASIC language and the desire to make computers accessible to everyone. Thank you for this incredible piece of history. Shalom(Peace)
Basic was my first programming language as it was taught to us in 5th grade. that was almost 10 years ago and most of my friends (who shared the same class) forgot it, but still basic remains fresh in my mind.
I learned BASIC when I attended Indiana University at the East campus, in Richmond, IN, during the summer of 1981. This was between 11th and 12th grade. I used a 300 baud modem with my TRS-80 Model 1 to do my subsequent 😢programming classes after I decided the computer field was for me. I've been in IT now over 40 years, with the last 33 yrs as a DBA ( Database Administrator ) working primarily with Oracle, but other DBMS's as well. Thanks to Dartmouth for developing BASIC, otherwise who knows what my career path wold have been.
what should i say.. just thank you! so much! got my atari 8 bit in the early 80s...basic was my world... you created my carreer!
My first introduction to BASIC was Microsoft's Level II BASIC for Tandy's TRS-80 computers. All in all, it was one of the better implementations of BASIC for Z-80 based computers. At that time, most of my programs were loaded or saved to cassette tapes.
Bilal Heuser . I had a Vic 20 with a tape drive. Entered the programs from a book and then had to debug them! We had TRS 80s and PETs in industrial arts and Apple 2s in a computer lab at HS. Friends dad had an IBM 5150 he let us play with DOS commands on. Good times!
Mine was The Coco. It was not until the vic-20 did I get assembler around my head but when I did..... all other processors were cake. So basic was the key for me.
I've been in programming since 1978 - went into university and have been at it ever since. So, I was born right about the start of this and being a history buff I have really enjoyed this history. Amazing stuff.
In 2005 I met an elderly gentleman who had worked on ENIAC, when it was still at the university!
He had gone on to work with IBM on the Sage air defense systems, specializing on user interfaces. He had two patents that had only recently been declassified.
Amazing, to meet one of the very early pioneers of the industry - still alive.
Unfortunately, like a moron, I did not get his name!
Thanks for all your work. I learned BASIC when I was a kid, with my father (my hero), using a brasilian Sharp/Epcom Hotbit, a MSX machine.
I have no words to thank you all. God bless!
I have fond memories of being introduced to an IBM version of BASIC in 1971 as a sophomore in high school in Oregon, which we used via a Teletype Model 33 accessing a time-share computer. I was soon writing all sorts of silly programs, such as one that played Solitaire with itself....you just sat there and watched it win or lose. The following year they changed the computer to a Hewlett Packard 2000, and when we got upgraded to 32K of storage space I thought "Wow! Look at what we can do with this." I was making wordsearch puzzles and having it compose ridiculous Haiku poetry, along with a chat program to talk to other schools. It was endless enjoyment for a small number of nerds in the schools. One of the imported games was a version of Qubic. At first it seemed to be unbeatable, but then I found a loophole, one move early on that it had a blind spot for, and I could always win after that. In 1975 at a community college, they had a version of BASIC on a computer that was still using punched cards, so I punched in a maze program and generated mazes on their lineprinter that were sometimes six feet long. Too much fun.
This is an impressive story. I cut my teeth on BASIC. I couldn't fit the computer class into my class schedule so the Biology dept. said If I wrote some programs for them, they would let me skip the class. I had so much fun I would forget to eat! One problem I had was, if I did too much compiling of the code I wrote, they would put me on a low priority level, the computer would then stop working for me and I had to do something else.
I was surprised to learn that the "John G. Kemeny" associated with BASIC was the same associated with the "Kemeny Report" about what went wrong at Three Mile Island
I learned it in 1979-1980 using the "BASIC Programming" cartridge for my Atari 2600. I ended up buying Commodore 16, then Commodore 64/128. Later bought an XT in college and enjoyed GWBASIC, QuickBasic 4.5, Professional Development System 7.1 and then Visual Basic 1.0, etc. These were amazing years to be alive, I wrote many BBS's and made a ton of friends who I collaborated on development projects with.
Around 1970 I was using a timeshare system for simulating electronic circuits - all input and output by teletype. The timeshare company also installed a BASIC compiler. To run it you typed:
BASIC
and the response came back:
BASIC
FOR HELP TYPE HELP
but every time you typed HELP the computer would always, without fail, respond:
I'M SORRY I CANNOT HELP YOU
From that time on I was in love with computers!
As a Dartmouth undergrad from 1968-1972, I distinctly remember a couple of classmates who were in the Kiewit Computer center courtesy of a certain social science course that they were then taking. I don't recall the exact course, but their homework assignment involved their short answers to a series of questions on their required reading. It was a written quiz, of sorts.
The program was written to respond with short phrases either congratulating them for a correct answer or informing them that their answer was incorrect and encouraging them to "try again". I was sitting nearby when one of my friends suddenly burst out laughing, LOUDLY! I asked him what was going on. He showed me: After a series of unsuccessful answers to one question, he had gotten so frustrated that he had typed "F___ you!" as his response.
Reflexively, , the timeshare terminal typed back to him, "F___ you, too!"
Just one more reason I loved my years at Dartmouth.
"At the time, we didn't know that this was supposed to be impossible."
Started programming in Basic on a Casio PB 100 with 1 KB ram and 2 lines of LCD screens. For Christmas I was given the module to add a second Kilobyte (spaces DID count as 1 byte). Then at school there was an Apple IIe. I learned by copying programs from an italian magazine, there was no printer then. Finally, my parents bought me an Apple IIc then upgraded to Apple IIGS. Basic and ProDOS were just amazing. AppleWorks... the Beagle Bros software utils. Amazing. Then came the Mac and I moved to DOS... Basic is great and I appreciate now how powerful Python is.
Was sent off to a Basic training course with work many years ago. I failed terribly and have had a great admiration for developers ever since.
a much later version of BASIC was my first programming language in 1978 ... and BASIC still lives on today ...
Right? Um....u? Ha. No.
I bought a Commodore PET in the Summer of 1981 with money I had saved working as a dishwasher and janitor at my junior high school. I had learned BASIC from the back of Frank Herbert's book Without Me You're Nothing and spent the summer writing games like the ones I had seen on the PLATO System in the library of the local junior college. It was the best summer of my childhood. Thank you John Kemeny !
I wish that I had been a little older and could have attended Dartmouth College. I was only eight years old at the time. However, when I was 12 years old in 1968, my father let me program the IBM 1401 Southwestern Bell Telephone in St Louis. That was the joys of Fortran.
My Main Frame computer use started in the late '60s while still in HS. There was a group of us Physics students who along with our teacher had a once per week 3 hr. night time block on the School District's machine. It was always completely shut down before we arrived. We would have to power up the machine, run our bootstrap load & Go card through the card reader to start the minimum processes. Then key in at the console the instructions to load the main operating system and our desired compilers from tape. We then spent the rest of our time block submitting our card decks and collecting our printed output. I had a separate arrangement with the head of the Computer Center where 3 times a week during the 30 minutes they were at lunch I would have free use of the machine for my personal COBOL project. What was really wild by today's standards is their scrap printer paper that we used for our night time sessions had the source code for the school district's payroll system on it. I was able to obtain enough printout to start self-teaching myself COBOL. After I started my lunch time sessions that year the Computer Center would give me their outdated programming and operating systems manuals whenever there was a software upgrade. At that time Honeywell was putting out upgrades for one software product or another about every quarter. Sometimes Assembly, sometime COBOL, etc. Unlike IBM, Honeywell at that time was giving their manuals free of charge, if you could show that you owned a previous version. So while in College I could go to the local Honeywell Office and get updates on my manuals.
Enjoyed your story!
Thanks for educating me that was a great history lesson.
I started to watch another Basic language 'nostalgic' UA-cam video, they showed a couple of B&W photos of the DTSS days and then said something about "but it really began when Bill Gates..."
Thanks for posting this video.
Thanks for a fascinating video. I graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1966. There I learned Fortran and ran it through punch cards on an IBM 360 (I believe). It was not until the mid-1980s that I got my own PC and learned PC BASIC. Having lived through this time period, this gives me insights I did not have before this video. Thanks again.
wow awesome video. I met BASIC in 1986 blessings to all CONTRIBUTORS.
This was an AMAZING watch. Thanks for uploading this Gem
This is much more about the invention of a time-sharing system for simultaneous multiple users than it is about the invention of BASIC.
First used basic in about 1971. Somehow got some time on a TTY at the local library, with a school mate whose dad was a big chief at ICL (International Computers and Tabulators, later to become ICL) in Stevenage (England). Doing A level maths, I was understandably blown away when I was able to write basic code that solved any quadratic including giving complex roots .... never ever forgot those few hours that evening and have grown up using computers all my life (now 68), mostly for serious investigations and teaching aids, rarely for games (except online chess!). Kemeny's words about the potential pitfalls of computers were so prophetic .. a man who absolutely understood the future.
Forgot to add .... yes an awesome video!
BASIC was my first programming language. It's disturbing to know that my skills are now considered museum worthy lol
The programming skills I learned on the TI 99/4A got a great job working for the Army doing automated testing. My son took an interest later in life and became the developer of Hyperspin.
I studied Structured Basic at Dartmouth in the early 80s with Kemeny as my prof (he was also Dartmouth's president at the time.) He cut quite a figure, always in a tweed jacket and tie, smoking cigarettes with a black holder in class. I got an A on my final project, a game of five-on-five Ultimate Frisbee that you played against the computer, all ASCII graphics.
I still use the BASIC variant developed by HP. Great and powerful. It is called HTBASIC today.
I was using the GE Timesharing with BASIC as a freshman at my high school in 1969. We had an ASR33 teletype with a 110 baud phone modem. We would write the text for BASIC programs during the day and print out the program text on a paper tape. At night when it was cheaper, a student on a work scholarship would run those paper tapes through the timeshare system to get the output. They would paper clip the paper output to the paper tape. Next day, we would see what we got. We did that for two years, then we got timeshare BASIC from a local college. We could use that realtime during the day on the teletype.
I would like to hear the full clip of Professors John Kemeny's predictions on computing at 33:26.
War Hammer, I don't know of a UA-cam video that has his entire speech, but Kemeny looks into the future in his book mentioned in this video by his daughter, Jennifer I think. The book is "Man and the Computer", available on Ebay and/or Amazon. I have a copy and it is very insightful. The man was a genius.
"A computer is a furniture." That's some big brain strategy. What a bunch of legends.
Awesome... I started my career in IT programming in Basic in 1975/76...
I started computing in 75 added basic in 76 added Fortran IV soon afterwards. I ran TTY ASR33 and finally got a Tube. I had several of those. I had a Queme Printer - a 132 column daisy wheel printer that a news paper was published on. I was doing Bio Rhythms and Book library listing to say the least. Charter in North Texas Computer Society. It was College students, professors, I was one of the latter and all sorts of others in sheet metal companies. Floppies were 8" Hard sector (get more bits on than Soft sector). Fun days in computing.
I once wrote a trivial BASIC program on the GE TTY at AZ State U where my father was Prof of Mathematics. I still hve the BASIC October 1964 manual we used then.
"..and so FORTH." I see what you did there. Right at the start. Even before naming BASIC.
Lol
So thankful for smart people. I really enjoy the Internet, my I-Phone, my PC, etc. TY.
Playing a computer game before they were connected to displays, where everything was printed, must have consumed VAST quantities of paper! Still, I imagine it was a very exciting time, when people involved were watching the technology expand and improve by leaps and bounds. To look at where we are now, it's hard to believe that that computer was $300,000 and was VERY slow.
One of the very best improvements that has ever been made to the BASIC language, if you ask me, is the removal of line numbers. I used to hate having to mess with that and renumbering if you needed to insert a section of code. With the addition of labels (and function calls) it allowed BASIC to stay as neat as possible.
Penn State had a FORTRAN club during the 1963-64 year, my senior year. I recall attending a few meetings.
Great story, I had no idea of all this background. To think that in order to use a computer, you first had to write an operating system. This would never be considered today. I remember wanting to build my own computer using Heathkit parts and a TV studio monitor. Much was needed in electronics design including an interface from the computer to the monitor providing a character generator. And of course, being on a tight budget, memory storage was a cassette tape drive. It never worked very well and you prayed there would be no power failure when saving a program. My first full computer system, was a Kaypro, luggable, followed by an AT&T PC 6300, with floppy discs. Boy was it fast!
I learned to program basic on a Commodore Pet 8K of ram. Parlayed that into a lifetime job in network engineering. Retired now and happy to be there🌴
Started programming on time-share in high school - basic of course - in 79. Wrote a moon lander program, program to make banners, tic-tac-toe etc. Maybe i was using some version of Dartmouth's time share. Went to college - got a Commodore 64 for home use, then a MS-DOS PC 8086 clone .. nearly 40 years later i'm doing C++, C# and Java on Windows and Linux. Made a great living at it. Born in a lucky time I guess. So Thanks Kemeny !
It's amazing that a film about the development of a programming language could be so beautiful!
The first code I wrote was some very simple Apple Basic programs in 6th grade. In high school, I dabbled with QuickBasic. Of course, I moved on to other languages after that, and have been writing C++ for a living for a couple of decades. Basic isn't my favorite language, but my life would very likely be quite different had I not been introduced to Basic in school.
I wrote my first basic program in 1970 in high school. We had a punch tape teletype to submit our programs. So the timesharing had already spread nationwide.
Amazing. We really do stand on the shoulders of Giants. My first programs were written in BASIC on a PC in 1986.
My first brush with basic was in 1987 whit a sony pocket computer/scientific calculator, came with a book on how to use basic. Pretty fun and eye opening about where life would go. This was back in El Salvador when I was a student at UCA. I still have the computer and book.
The joy of BASIC was to learn the concepts of solid programming, including using teams to write subroutines to a Nassi-Schneiderman diagram.
Great days.
ahh waterloo BASIC is what i learned in highschool ... at home I did 68k programming on my vic-20 ... even networked that to 2 c64's and 2 printers and 2 hard drives PLUS a fax machine ... it was great fun ...
.learned fortran fortran 77, C C+, C++ turbo C ... Turbo C++ Pascal CPM .. assembler 68k assembly ... funniest part I learned these in high school when I was in college it was my highschool courses all over again ... drove the teachers nuts pointing out the text books errors because they didnt BOTHER to check the programs ... the dean forced my comp sci teacher to give me an A+ ... since I literally proved his teaching method faulty and his book teachings inadequate ... and even showed them the same book he was using from my highschool ... and all the exact same assignments ... that teacher never liked me after that ... even my 68k assmebler teacher hated me because I flew through the years assignments in a week ... so he kept changing them ... the dean stopped that too .... I would have gotten exemptions but we were allowed 3 per semester and I had maxed those on other courses ...
Wow, you really pushed the limits of both your college and your college teachers. Well done, but sorry you paid a price.
I learned BASIC on one of these systems at my high school in Oklahoma City in the mid-70's. It was my first exposure to computing and programming. That's why I'm in computing.
Incidentally, Dartmouth College was founded by my ancestor Eleazar Wheelock. So, I can say that he's reason I'm in computing, today.
I learned how to program at the age of 12 in 1988. The system was the Atari XE. The language? BASIC. I didn't get the system for programming, in fact I had no idea that was a thing on this system. But it came with a very large book on how to program and I read it and learned it. My dad, who was an Electrical Engineer, was absolutely thrilled because he learned BASIC as an undergrad at the University of Cincinnati back in 1971-ish. So for a brief period, we had loads of fun programming together in the late 80s. Its really a shame I didn't stick with it. Maybe I could be a multi-millionaire in Silicon Valley or something.
"Basic Programing with an Introduction to Logic". A class I took at Grand Blanc High in Michigan in '77. A few years later, it got me a good job at my company. There were maybe 3 people with computer experience. Accounting, Engineering, and me.
My computer career began in 1962, I was 20.
My first experience was on a Univac SS80, that did not even use conventional binary or more correctly BCD.
It used a form of binary called BIQUINARY that had a numerical sequence of 1,2,4,5 NOT 1,2,4,8.
It used a 40 bit word composed of 10 characters of 4 bits each.
Because BIQUINARY did not have sufficient space to encode alphabetic characters it was necessary to use use 2 40 bit words and the hardware would combine 4 bits from one word with 4 bits from the corresponding word to encode or decode a full set of characters.
Oh and to make things worse there was NO static memory all data and program code was stored on a magnetic drum and had to be transferred programmatically to a series of registers and then manipulated. To add 2 numbers together the operands would be transferred to the appropriate registers, added together with the result ending up in another register. That result would then have to be transferred back to a location on the drum.
All of this had to be programmed using hard coded addresses of the drum locations.
LOAD DRUM ADDRESS 5 TO REGISTER A
LOAD DRUM ADDRESS 6 TO REGISTER B.
ADD A TO B.
TRANSFER THE CONTENTS OF REGISTER B TO DRUM ADDRESS 7.
These commands would be written in BIQUINARY code, my use of the words ADD and LOAD are just for illustration.
In machine language ALL those addresses had to be chosen by the programmer and you had to remember where you put the result so that you could use it later.
Then we had a ASSEMBLER program in which we could write the command ADD and the assembler would translate that to the correct BIQUINARY COMMAND CODE. It also relieved you of the task of remembering DRUM ADDRESSES by using a variable name such as RESULT-A.
Then there was the problem of remembering where the R/W heads were on the rotating drum and calculating if you could access data without having to wait and extra Revolution to access what you had stored in RESULT-A.
But it was GREAT FUN and a challenge that we accepted and reveled in.
Those were the days, today it is SO EASY all I have to do is say ALEXA BUY ME A NEW WALKING CANE and it arrives promptly from AMAZON.
Just joking I have yet to need a cane, but my memory and mind are wearing out. My beloved granddaughter thinks that I am CRAZEEEE, at 15 she knows everything and has the sighing and rolling of the eyes down to perfection.
But I adore her and her 9 year old brother, he still thinks that granddad is a genius.
BASIC was an ideal way into programming for me in 1980/81 aged 8/9
I remember how I launched Reversi on my first personal computer, and could not believe that I was being beaten dry by an algorithm written in BASIC. It should be noted that the program thought about each move for a noticeably long time, but nevertheless.
Then I realized that it doesn't matter how slow computers are now (this was 1988). If I can solve a problem using BASIC, then the problem is solved.
So I came up with a way to debug programs: write a program in BASIC, debug it, and then translate it into Assembly.
The next couple of days were spent writing the Auto Racing game. I invited my friends to play. At first they didn’t succeed, but pretty quickly they got used to it and became bored - nothing happened in the game.
Making games is harder than I thought. But it was impossible to make a complex plot on that computer. So I wrote my next game on the IBM PC.
What they focused on and found revolutionary was later, with the home computer, becoming less important: sharing computers and remote calculations. Also with private phones, it's sort of less important. But with cloud computing, it has become very important again.
My point is that this evolution wasn't/isn't linear, it's more circular.
My CS teachers mentioned MS BASIC a lot, but not the earlier origins of BASIC. This is very interesting for me.
We had timeshare access to an IBM 370 in 1975 as a high school student in far off St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada. It was the first time they had provided computer access to HS students and we learned Basic. We had a teletype in our physics class and, in the first year, we had access after school as part of a club.
There was a second school in the city that also had access, but they weren't as keen as we were at mine. We burned through our allotted timeshare amount (mostly playing games...) fairly early in the semester, so we hacked the other schools password, started to burn through their time and continued on our merry way to the end of the term. Hackers in 1975 we were...
27:49 I used that machine- still remember my user code! :)
Man, this video took me back! While I was in high school in the 70s, I was one of those geeks carrying around punch cards and paper tapes in my backpack. Sometimes I had them spilling out into view. Nowadays, the geeks carry USB keys smaller than a thumbnail which can hold thousands or millions of times the data than those old storage media could handle.
Also, I laughed aloud when I heard a program of 3000 plus lines called "big." Contrast a mere 3000 lines of code with the mega- and giga-line behemoths of today! Boggles the mind to consider!
My favorite command of years past on our HP-2000A:
MAT A=ZER
Made initializing easy especially when writing code on a noisy decwriter during math class!
Great story! I was at Taft High in Woodland Hills, CA in 1968-9 when they offered students in AP Math to try programming in Basic.
Ooops... anyway, some fellow had set up a clunk, clunk, clunk teletype that output punched tape. We wrote a simple program and ran the tape back through and got the answer. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t impressed and said thanks, but no thanks. It was the time of the summer of love and my interests pointed decidedly toward art and music, my life career ended up in commercial photography. Life’s been good, but I can’t help being curious where I would have ended, if I could find the right ‘multi-verse’ version where I’d made a different choice
Comparable to many others, I started when I encountered very basic BASIC programming on a DEC PDP-11 in 1978 & went on to make a pretty useful 20 year career in IT. Until those jobs went to India, & I became a forklift operator until retirement. But my financial solvency/security & own home is attributable to it.