BASIC & DTSS - 50 years later

Apple II: My first personal computer

I lived through this whole process and don't have to imagine it. I learned to program first on the University of Maryland IBM 360 using PL/I & FORTRAN on punched card decks from 1965-67. In the Navy, I worked with NTDS military computers based on UNIVAC and digital data links, flipping switches, punched cards, and paper tapes from 1970-74. Then I worked at Hughes using IBM batch as well as DTSS and IBM Time Sharing Option through terminals with paper tape readers. The first computer I personally owned was an Apple II. 

Without BASIC, the computer revolution from being primarily a computing device to an everyday knowledge tool would have been much slower.

Apple II had two BASICs, Integer and Floating

Basic Turns 50 | EE Times

This month, BASIC celebrates an anniversary reached by very few languages: 50 years of continuous use. During that long career, whose highlights mostly occurred before the age of 25, it has beckoned millions to the world of programming, most of whom immediately forsook the language for more robust alternatives.

It's difficult to imagine the computing world in 1964. There were no PCs, nor even minicomputers, and networking was for all practical purposes nonexistent. Programming was done on mainframes that could support remote teletype machines over telephone lines. Programs were stored on decks of punched cards, or loops of very carefully handled paper tape. In this rather challenging environment, two Dartmouth professors, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, came up with the idea to create a simple, high-level language to teach programming.

▶ Live Webcast: The Future of Computing - The Next 50 Years - YouTube

The Original BASIC | True BASIC
MAY 1, 1964 -- The Birth of BASIC
Over 50 years later, it still enables anyone to write their own programs.

John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz invented BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) for use at Dartmouth College so that their students could quickly write useful computer programs and at the same time, understand what they were doing. English-like functions and statements helped ordinary folks perform extraordinary feats with their computer programs. They made it freely available to everyone who wanted to learn how to program computers. It soon became a world standard. True BASIC is still unequaled for raw power, logical approach, and easy-to-comprehend usability.


Introduction - DTSS - Dartmouth Time Sharing System

A small group of "friends of DTSS" have started a project to recreate the first DTSS (Phase I), which ran from 1964 to sometime in 1967. This system ran on two computers, a GE-235 to execute programs (such as ones written in BASIC) and a GE DN-30 (Datanet-30) to handle communications (to and from teletypes) and to schedule the execution of programs on the 235. This ingenious two-computer design was created by Tom Kurtz and John Kemeny. 

Kurtz & Kemeny

John G. Kemeny: BASIC and DTSS: Everyone a Programmer

The work of Kemeny and Kurtz in the early 1960's took two directions. Influenced by the work of J.C.R. Licklider and John McCarthy at MIT, Kemeny understood that a time sharing system would make possible the universal access they aimed for. A team of the two faculty members and a group of undergraduate research assistants developed a prototype system. It allowed multiple users short spurts of access to the central computer from remote terminals in such a way that each user enjoyed the illusion that he was the sole user. This Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS) became operational in the Fall of 1964. The value of a time sharing system is that it ended the hardship of batch processing which often required hours or even days of waiting between runs of a program while it was being developed and debugged. Time sharing utilizes the great speed of computers compared to humans to greatly enhance the efficiency of computing from the point of view of the human users. 

K&K BASIC let a whole generation of programmers
use Personal computers such as the Apple II, Mac, & IBM PC

The careful work of Kemeny and Kurtz to make an easy to learn but powerful computer language bore tremendous fruit. After its introduction at Dartmouth in 1964, BASIC spread as did DTSS to other campuses and government and military situations. And BASIC made personal computers possible. Beginning in 1975 with the success of Bill Gates and Paul Allen to write an interpreter for a subset of BASIC commands for the Altair computer, one form or another of BASIC spread to and accelerated the personal computer revolution. (See Amateur Computerist, vol 2 no 4, p. 9-12)