BASIC (1964)
Computers in the early 1960s were big, expensive, and difficult to program. Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny at Dartmouth decided to devise an easy-to-learn high-level language. Kurtz and Kemeny agreed on eight design principles for their new language:
- Be easy for beginners to use
- Be a general-purpose language
- Allow advanced features to be added for experts (while keeping it simple for beginners)
- Be interactive
- Provide clear and friendly error messages
- Respond fast for small programs
- Not require an understanding of computer hardware
- Shield the user from the operating system
The name was a contraction of Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
Dartmouth BASIC
Based partly on FORTRAN II and Algol 60, BASIC used numbered lines and included 14 instructions: LET, READ, DATA, INPUT, GOTO, IF-THEN, and others. BASIC first ran on the GE-225 mainframe on May 1, 1964 at 4 a.m., bowing to the nocturnal tradition of computing. Contrary to popular belief, it was a compiled language at the time of its introduction.
Success of BASIC
By fall 1964, Kurtz and Kemeny began their freshman programming course. Though not a requirement, the programming course was taken by 80 percent of students. The liberal arts students embraced the style of computing offered at Dartmouth — BASIC had achieved its goal of making programming accessible to non-scientists.