Experience with BASIC
W.L. BENEDICT NIXON · ITNOW · 1969
BASIC – an acronym for Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code – is a general-purpose programming language distinguished by its extreme simplicity: it can be summarised for reference purposes in a page or so, and can be learnt in an hour or two even by newcomers to programming; furthermore the construction of a BASIC compiler is a relatively modest project, and is feasible even for a small-capacity computer. It originated as a central feature of the ‘Dartmouth system’, which is a multi-access computer facility for general university use developed at Dartmouth University, New Hampshire, and implemented on General Electric hardware. Copies of the Dartmouth system have been installed at a number of places; the first in this country, offering remote terminal rental as a commercial service, was set up in London by De La Rue Bull in August 1967. When Professors Kemeny and Kurtz embarked on the Dartmouth system project in 1963, their aims were to make it possible for every undergraduate in the university to have some experience of computer use, and that those students – and also those faculty members – who could make more substantial use of a computing facility should be able to do so. They foresaw two main obstacles: the first was what they regarded as the unacceptability, except to a dedicated and persistent minority, of a conventional batch-processing computer centre – hence the multi-access time-sharing basis of the system. The second obstacle was the programming-language problem: in their own words even ‘a language tike FORTRAN or ALGOL requires that the user remember a large number of conventions and that he specify a wide variety of options. This makes it harder to learn the language, and occasional users complain that they have to “relearn” the language each time. In BASIC whenever conventions are necessary or options available, a simple choice is automatically provided for the novice. It is tremendously encouraging to the novice, be he a student or a member of the Faculty, that he can do something interesting on the computer during the first week of the training program. Our freshmen learn to program in BASIC in two one-hour lectures: these two lectures, together with a very brief manual, enable them to be on their own on the computer; after that they learn from their own experience’. The Dartmouth system does not limit itself to BASIC; both FORTRAN and ALGOL are available for those who need or wish to go on to them.