> On May 1, 2024, at 6:26 PM, Mike Katz via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
> The Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC)
>
> Developed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1963.
> This ran on the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS) which was an early time
> sharing system running on Honeywell and GE Main Frames with Datanet systems
> running the terminal interfaces.
>
> This system was intended to be an online code/run/debug cycle system rather
> than a batch processing system like most Cobol and Fortran compilers were.
>
> BASIC was actually their third language attempt to simplify the syntax of
> languages like Fortran and Algol.
>
> There are literally 100's of dialects of BASIC, both as compilers (as was the
> original) and interpreters and even pseudo compilers.
>
> Like many of us older members of this thread, some form of BASIC was our
> "computer milk language" (our first computer language).
>
> Some early microcomputers even wrote their operating systems in some form of
> BASIC.
>
> I learned basic in September of 1972 on a 4K PDP-8/L running EduSystem 10
> Basic with time also spent at the Kiewit Computation Center at Dartmouth (as
> a 12 year old) running Dartmouth Basic.
>
> Let's hear your earliest introduction to BASIC.
BASIC was my fourth language, after ALGOL-60, FORTRAN-II, and Philips PR8000
assembler. The first version I met was BASIC-PLUS, on RSTS-11. That's a
compiler (to threaded code, like P-code, not to machine code). Soon after that
I worked on RT-11 BASIC, which is an interpreter, and modified it to be a lab
machine control system with interrupts and analog and digital I/O.
Someone commented on "what if the first PCs had run APL". Shortly after
reading the famous "Tablet" paper (Stephen Wolfram and his students at U of
Illinois) I played a bit with that notion: a tablet computer supporting APL so
you could program quickly because it requires so few characters per unit of
work. The crucial miss in that concept is that PCs are not sold (primarily) to
programmers but to application users, and for that an APL-focused machine is no
advantage.
paul
