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BASIC: The Language Built for People Who Didn't Want to Program

Zusammenfassung

BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was created in 1964 at Dartmouth College by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz specifically so that students who were not science or engineering majors could use computers. The founding insight was that computers were too useful to restrict to specialists — and that restricting them to specialists was a failure of educational design, not a technical necessity. BASIC ran on Dartmouth’s time-sharing system starting May 1, 1964, allowing up to 30 students to use the same computer simultaneously. Bill Gates wrote a BASIC interpreter as his first major commercial product; BASIC was the first programming language millions of people learned.

The Problem Kemeny and Kurtz Were Solving

In the early 1960s, computing required considerable technical skill: programmers worked in assembly language or Fortran, submitted batch jobs on punched cards, and waited hours for results. The barrier to entry was high enough that most university students — including students in economics, psychology, history, and the natural sciences — never used a computer.

John Kemeny (a mathematician who had been John von Neumann’s assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study) and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth believed this was wrong. They designed a system with two components:

  1. Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS): Multiple teletype terminals connected to a single computer, allowing simultaneous use by many students. Each user appeared to have the machine to themselves.
  2. BASIC: A simple programming language with a small number of statements, immediate feedback, and no batch-job submission. A student could type a program and run it in seconds.

The language was deliberately designed to have no features that required computer science background. Variables were single letters; line numbers organized the program; GOTO allowed branching; FOR/NEXT provided loops; INPUT and PRINT handled interaction. A student could learn the complete language in an afternoon.

May 1, 1964

At 4:00 AM on May 1, 1964, Kemeny and Kurtz ran the first BASIC programs simultaneously from two terminals on the GE-225 mainframe — the first demonstration of BASIC on a time-sharing system. Both programs ran simultaneously and both ran correctly. They went to bed.

Within years, Dartmouth’s system was handling hundreds of simultaneous users and influencing other universities. BASIC spread beyond Dartmouth primarily through a licensing arrangement with General Electric, which ran BASIC on its time-sharing network — making the language available to businesses and schools without GE mainframes.

The Microsoft Connection

When the Altair 8800 personal computer kit appeared in January 1975, it had no software. Bill Gates and Paul Allen saw the Popular Electronics cover story on the Altair and recognized that a BASIC interpreter for it would be immediately valuable to every purchaser. They wrote Altair BASIC (now called Microsoft BASIC) and licensed it to MITS. This became Microsoft’s first commercial product and the foundation of a software company.

Gates’s choice of BASIC was not accidental. BASIC was the first programming language that non-specialist programmers — hobbyists, engineers, scientists — had learned in the previous decade. A BASIC interpreter was the most obviously useful piece of software for a new personal computer. Gates understood that software value follows installed base.

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