Today, we expect computers–and phones, and tablets and an array of other intelligent devices–to respond to our instructions and requests as fast as we can make them. (Kemeny died in 1992.) “We needed a language that could be ‘taught’ to virtually all students (and faculty) without their having to take a course.” “We were thinking only of Dartmouth,” says Kurtz, its surviving co-creator. (I happen to have been born less than a month before BASIC was, which may or may not have anything to do with my affinity for it.)īASIC wasn’t designed to change the world. That’s when I was introduced to the language when I was in high school, I was more proficient in it than I was in written English, because it mattered more to me. Especially the multiple versions of the language produced by a small company named Microsoft. In the 1970s and early 1980s, when home computers came along, BASIC did as much as anything else to make them useful. It worked: at first at Dartmouth, then at other schools. The two math professors deeply believed that computer literacy would be essential in the years to come, and designed the language–its name stood for “Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code”–to be as approachable as possible.
Kurtz of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, BASIC was first successfully used to run programs on the school’s General Electric computer system 50 years ago this week–at 4 a.m.
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