Fifty Years of BASIC, the Language That Made Computers Personal. MY ACCOUNTSIGN INSIGN OUTSUBSCRIBESUBSCRIBEMORETIMETech. Technologizer. Adrian N. Bouchard / Dartmouth University. Early in BASIC's history, its creators, John Kemeny (left) and Thomas Kurtz (center) go over a program with a Dartmouth student. Knowing how to program a computer is good for you, and it’s a shame more people don’t learn to do it. For years now, that’s been a hugely popular stance. It’s led to educational initiatives as effortless sounding as the Hour of Code (offered by Code. Code Year (spearheaded by Codecademy). Fantaisie Software Official WebSite. PureBasic - Feel The Pure Power. PureBasic is a programming language based on established BASIC rules. Shareware version of Liberty BASIC, links to related sites, mailing list. Even President Obama has chimed in. Last December, he issued a You. Tube video in which he urged young people to take up programming, declaring that “learning these skills isn’t just important for your future, it’s important for our country’s future.”I find the “everybody should learn to code” movement laudable. And yet it also leaves me wistful, even melancholy. Once upon a time, knowing how to use a computer was virtually synonymous with knowing how to program one. And the thing that made it possible was a programming language called BASIC. Adrian N. Bouchard / Dartmouth College. John Kemeny shows off his vanity license plate in 1. Invented by John G. Kurtz of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, BASIC was first successfully used to run programs on the school’s General Electric computer system 5. It worked: at first at Dartmouth, then at other schools. In the 1. 97. 0s and early 1. BASIC did as much as anything else to make them useful. Especially the multiple versions of the language produced by a small company named Microsoft. 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. But thinking of its invention as a major moment only in the history of computer languages dramatically understates its significance. In the mid- 1. 96. You used a keypunch to enter a program on cards, turned them over to a trained operator and then waited for a printout of the results, which might not arrive until the next day. BASIC and the platform it ran on, the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, both sped up the process and demystified it. You told the computer to do something by typing words and math statements, and it did it, right away.“We were thinking only of Dartmouth.”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. In many ways, that era of instant gratification began with what Kemeny and Kurtz created. Moreover, their work reached the public long before the equally vital breakthroughs of such 1. Visual Basic Express is a fast and easy way to create programs for Microsoft Windows. Even if you are new to Windows programming, with Visual Basic you have a. This is an alphabetical list of BASIC dialects—interpreted and compiled variants of the BASIC programming language. Each dialect's platform(s), i.e., the computer. BASIC programming resources. A 32-bit BASIC compiler, with the. A free compiler for a Basic-like language, with QuickBasic source code. Basic programming language free download - Nano Basic programming language interpreter. Visual Basic.NET programming language for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. ThinBASIC is a BASIC programming language for Windows. ThinBASIC provides SDK allowing anyone to extend the language with compiled. ThinBASIC pseudo compiler. Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse and other concepts still with us in modern user interfaces. You might assume that a programming language whose primary purpose was to help almost anybody become computer- literate would be uncontroversial—maybe even universally beloved. BASIC always had its critics among serious computer science types, who accused it of promoting bad habits. Even its creators became disgruntled with the variations on their original idea that proliferated in the 1. And eventually, BASIC went away, at least as a staple of computing in homes and schools. Nobody conspired to get rid of it; no one factor explains its gradual disappearance from the scene. But some of us miss it terribly. When it comes to technology, I don’t feel like a grumpy old man. Nearly always, I believe that the best of times is now. But I don’t mind saying this: The world was a better place when almost everybody who used PCs at least dabbled in BASIC. BASIC Beginnings. Sooner or later, it was inevitable that someone would come up with a programming language aimed at beginners. But BASIC as it came to be was profoundly influenced by the fact that it was created at a liberal arts college with a forward- thinking mathematics program. Dartmouth became that place largely because of the vision of its math department chairman, John Kemeny. Born in Budapest in 1. Jewish, Kemeny came to the United States in 1. Nazis. He attended Princeton, where he took a year off to contribute to the Manhattan Project and was inspired by a lecture about computers by the pioneering mathematician and physicist John von Neumann. Dartmouth College. John Kemeny teaches BASIC to students at Dartmouth (not yet a co- ed institution)Kemeny worked as Albert Einstein’s mathematical assistant before arriving at Dartmouth as a professor in 1. He became known for his inventive approach to the teaching of math: When the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation gave the school a $5. TIME noted the news and said it was mostly due to Kemeny’s reputation. The thinking that led to the creation of BASIC sprung from “a general belief on Kemeny’s part that liberal arts education was important, and should include some serious and significant mathematics–but math not disconnected from the general goals of liberal arts education,” says Dan Rockmore, the current chairman of Dartmouth’s math department and one of the producers of a new documentary on BASIC’s birth. The machines were kept “behind locked doors, where only guys–and, once in a while, a woman–in white coats were able to access them,” Rockmore says. Kemeny believed that these electronic brains would play an increasingly important role in everyday life, and that everyone at Dartmouth should be introduced to them. That’s why you typically handed your program over on punch cards and waited your turn. Tom Kurtz, who had joined Dartmouth’s math department in 1. It would divvy up one system’s processing power to serve multiple people at a time. With what came to be known as the Dartmouth Time- Sharing System, or DTSS, a user sitting at a terminal would be able to compose programs and run them immediately. Dartmouth College. A schematic of Dartmouth’s time- sharing system, as shown in an October 1. If you’re trying to get a student interested in the idea of computing, you need some immediacy in the turnaround,” says Rockmore. In the past, Kemeny and Kurtz had made two unsuccessful stabs at creating computer languages for beginners: Darsimco (Dartmouth Simplified Code) and DOPE (Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment). But this time they considered modifying an existing language. Adrian N. Bouchard / Dartmouth College. Tom Kurtz (standing) works with Michael Busch, co- programmer of the DTSS, with the GE- 2. I tried, briefly, to develop simple subsets of Fortran and ALGOL, but found quickly that such could not be done,” Kurtz says. Even the most common of tasks could be tricky in Fortran, which had an “almost impossible- to- memorize convention for specifying a loop: . It certainly would have curtailed its widespread popularity.”So Kemeny and Kurtz decided to create something so straightforward that it almost didn’t involve memorization at all. Starting in September 1. Kurtz began the overarching effort to get the language and the DTSS up and running. They led a team of a dozen undergraduate students–young men who were still in the process of learning about computers themselves. Bouchard / Dartmouth College. Tom Kurtz and John Kemeny examine a brochure for the GE- 2. Dartmouth’s time- sharing system. A $3. 00,0. 00 grant from the National Science Foundation helped fund the undertaking, which required not one but two powerful computers, both from General Electric. A GE- 2. 25 mainframe (quickly replaced with a faster GE- 2. Datanet- 3. 0 coordinated communications with Teletype machines–essentially glorified typewriters–which students would use to do their programming.“We were not working under much constraints,” Kurtz says. It performed that task rapidly, especially by the leisurely standards of 1. If you were writing a very simple program, you’d get your answer in a second or so,” Mc. Geachie says. Not one brief BASIC program but two or three of them–accounts vary–ran simultaneously, proving both that BASIC worked and that the Dartmouth Time- Sharing System was capable of dealing with more than one user at a time. In June 1. 96. 4, they became generally available to Dartmouth students, initially on 1. Teletype machines. The first version of BASIC had 1. PRINT output text and numbers to the Teletype (and, later on, displayed it on the screens of time- sharing terminals and PCs); LET told the computer to perform calculations and assign the result to a variable, in statements such as LET C = (A*2. B; IF and THEN let the program determine if a statement was true, vital for anything involving decision- making; FOR and NEXT let a program run in loops; GOTO let a program branch to another numbered line within itself; END, which was required in Dartmouth BASIC, told the computer that it had reached the program’s conclusion. Then there was INPUT, a command that let a BASIC program accept alphanumeric characters typed in by a user. It wasn’t among the initial 1. But when it did, it made it possible to write far more interactive programs. Without INPUT, BASIC was mostly for solving math problems and doing simple simulations; with it, the language could do almost anything. Including play games, which many people came to consider as the language’s defining purpose. Adrian N. Bouchard / Dartmouth College. John Kemeny checks out program written by his daughter Jennifer on the family’s “home computer,” a terminal on the Dartmouth Time- Sharing System. You could write a fairly sophisticated program in Dartmouth BASIC. That was the whole point. It mattered to Kemeny and Kurtz that access to BASIC and the DTSS be as open as possible. No one asks him why he wants the book, and he does not need anyone’s permission,” Kemeny wrote in a brochure for the college’s new computer center, which opened in 1. No one will ask if he is solving a serious research problem, doing his homework the easy way, playing a game of football, or writing a letter to his girlfriend.”Adrian N. Bouchard / Dartmouth College. Free. BASIC Compiler download . Windows includes that and Linux/Unix makes high memory available, but DOS doesn't (Free. DOS does, I think). So a compiler like fbc or djgpp's gcc needs a DPMI add- on to work in pure DOS. It's available as one of the djgpp files from delorie. I think it needs to be installed by the config. The instructions should be on the delorie website. It wants ffi. h and I just built and installed libffi- 3. The header wasn't found. I dug and found that this lib release installs ffi. It makes a folder, /usr/lib/libffi- 3. I copied them to /usr/include and the compilation proceeded ok. Haven't tried the actual compiler. I think I'd rather have the entire package coded in a standard language like C or C++ instead of like Ada, with a component that must be built with self- compilation by a previous version. I'm also not seeing that there's a test suite to be run by . That would inspire confidence in users who might want to use Free. BASIC for business and other serious purposes. Hey, I've built new versions of the GCC compilers a number of times, always fun to see a build run quite cleanly. Speaking of standards compliance, the program statement. In testing various Basics, I've seen everything from 2 to 8 spaces between numbers. Standards compliance is kinda scarce in Basic. You wouldn't find that inaccuracy in a language implementation for grownups.
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