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Dartmouth BASIC
Dartmouth BASIC is the original version of the BASIC programming language. It was designed by two professors at Dartmouth College, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz. With the underlying Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS), it offered an interactive programming environment to all undergraduates as well as the larger university community.
Several versions were produced at Dartmouth, implemented by undergraduate students and operating as a compile and go system. The first version ran on 1 May 1964, and it was opened to general users in June. Upgrades followed, culminating in the seventh and final release in 1979. Dartmouth also introduced a dramatically updated version known as Structured BASIC (or SBASIC) in 1975, which added various structured programming concepts. SBASIC formed the basis of the American National Standards Institute-standard Standard BASIC efforts in the early 1980s.
Most dialects of BASIC trace their history to the Fourth Edition (which added, e.g., string variables, which most BASIC users take for granted, though the original could only print strings), but generally leave out more esoteric features like matrix math. In contrast to the Dartmouth compilers, most other BASICs were written as interpreters. This decision allowed them to run in the limited main memory of early microcomputers. Microsoft BASIC is one example, designed to run in only 4 KB of memory. By the late 1980s, tens of millions of home computers were running some variant of the MS interpreter. It became the de facto standard for BASIC, which led to the abandonment of the ANSI SBASIC efforts. Kemeny and Kurtz later formed a company to develop and promote a version of SBASIC known as True BASIC.
Many early mainframe games trace their history to Dartmouth BASIC and the DTSS system. A selection of these were collected, in HP Time-Shared BASIC versions, in the People's Computer Company book What to Do After You Hit Return. Many of the original source listings in BASIC Computer Games and related works also trace their history to Dartmouth BASIC.
John G. Kemeny joined the mathematics department of Dartmouth College in 1953 and later became its department chairman. In 1956 he gained access to an IBM 704 via MIT's New England Regional Computer Center efforts. That year, he wrote the DARSIMCO language, a version of assembler which simplified the programming of mathematical operations. He was aided by Thomas E. Kurtz, who joined the department that year.
DARSIMCO was forgotten when the first FORTRAN compiler was installed on the machine in 1957. The arrival of FORTRAN instilled an important lesson. Kurtz, having been indoctrinated that FORTRAN was slow, spent several months writing a program in 704 assembler which had taken up about an hour of CPU time to debug and still was not running. Giving up, he rewrote it in FORTRAN and had it running in five minutes. The lesson was that high-level languages could save time, regardless of their measured performance.
In 1959, the school received its first computer, the drum-based LGP-30. One student wrote a FORTRAN-inspired language called DART for the machine. This led to an effort to produce an ALGOL 58 compiler, turning to ALGOL 60 when that definition was finalized. Writing the compiler was difficult due to the very small memory size, 32 KB in modern terms, and was extremely slow, based on the drum speed of 3600 rpm. Nevertheless, they were able to produce a functional cut-down version known as ALGOL 30. Further development produced SCALP, the "Self-Contained Algol Processor", a one-pass compiler that was ready to run the compiled program as soon as the punched tape finished reading in the source. Output with the program results or any error messages would immediately appear. This compile-and-go style of operation would later be used by BASIC.
In 1962, Kemeny and high-school student Sidney Marshall began experimenting with a new language, DOPE (Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment). This used numbered lines to represent instructions, for instance, to add two numbers, DOPE used:
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Dartmouth BASIC
Dartmouth BASIC is the original version of the BASIC programming language. It was designed by two professors at Dartmouth College, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz. With the underlying Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS), it offered an interactive programming environment to all undergraduates as well as the larger university community.
Several versions were produced at Dartmouth, implemented by undergraduate students and operating as a compile and go system. The first version ran on 1 May 1964, and it was opened to general users in June. Upgrades followed, culminating in the seventh and final release in 1979. Dartmouth also introduced a dramatically updated version known as Structured BASIC (or SBASIC) in 1975, which added various structured programming concepts. SBASIC formed the basis of the American National Standards Institute-standard Standard BASIC efforts in the early 1980s.
Most dialects of BASIC trace their history to the Fourth Edition (which added, e.g., string variables, which most BASIC users take for granted, though the original could only print strings), but generally leave out more esoteric features like matrix math. In contrast to the Dartmouth compilers, most other BASICs were written as interpreters. This decision allowed them to run in the limited main memory of early microcomputers. Microsoft BASIC is one example, designed to run in only 4 KB of memory. By the late 1980s, tens of millions of home computers were running some variant of the MS interpreter. It became the de facto standard for BASIC, which led to the abandonment of the ANSI SBASIC efforts. Kemeny and Kurtz later formed a company to develop and promote a version of SBASIC known as True BASIC.
Many early mainframe games trace their history to Dartmouth BASIC and the DTSS system. A selection of these were collected, in HP Time-Shared BASIC versions, in the People's Computer Company book What to Do After You Hit Return. Many of the original source listings in BASIC Computer Games and related works also trace their history to Dartmouth BASIC.
John G. Kemeny joined the mathematics department of Dartmouth College in 1953 and later became its department chairman. In 1956 he gained access to an IBM 704 via MIT's New England Regional Computer Center efforts. That year, he wrote the DARSIMCO language, a version of assembler which simplified the programming of mathematical operations. He was aided by Thomas E. Kurtz, who joined the department that year.
DARSIMCO was forgotten when the first FORTRAN compiler was installed on the machine in 1957. The arrival of FORTRAN instilled an important lesson. Kurtz, having been indoctrinated that FORTRAN was slow, spent several months writing a program in 704 assembler which had taken up about an hour of CPU time to debug and still was not running. Giving up, he rewrote it in FORTRAN and had it running in five minutes. The lesson was that high-level languages could save time, regardless of their measured performance.
In 1959, the school received its first computer, the drum-based LGP-30. One student wrote a FORTRAN-inspired language called DART for the machine. This led to an effort to produce an ALGOL 58 compiler, turning to ALGOL 60 when that definition was finalized. Writing the compiler was difficult due to the very small memory size, 32 KB in modern terms, and was extremely slow, based on the drum speed of 3600 rpm. Nevertheless, they were able to produce a functional cut-down version known as ALGOL 30. Further development produced SCALP, the "Self-Contained Algol Processor", a one-pass compiler that was ready to run the compiled program as soon as the punched tape finished reading in the source. Output with the program results or any error messages would immediately appear. This compile-and-go style of operation would later be used by BASIC.
In 1962, Kemeny and high-school student Sidney Marshall began experimenting with a new language, DOPE (Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment). This used numbered lines to represent instructions, for instance, to add two numbers, DOPE used: