I wrote a lot of QBASIC. 1986-90ish, old Bangalore. I was 12. There was no Mac or Unix or Windows in India those days. Only MSDOS. I had a 386 box. I would insert a 5.25" floppy, boot into command.com, then CD to GWBASIC.EXE and enter GWBASIC. Wrote a lot of GWBASIC to annoy friends and family by emitting high pitched sounds. You could do SOUND 2000+i, j, where i is the frequency & j was duration. You could even control volume from BASIC. I would put that in a WHILE WEND loop and make it go crazy. People didn't know how to turn it off once it got going. Then suddenly one day DOS went away and we had something called MS WINDOWS 3.1 and you had to insert a white round ball into a mouse and click on icons, no more command line, and even GWBASIC was gone, they put QBASIC and it came with snake program. Then I got into the graphics craze. We had a CGA & so I did SCREEN 2, then used LINE and CIRCLE to my heart's content. Few colors only. Then we upgraded to VGA monitor then SCREEN 12 was a full 640x480, I wrote QBASIC to make annoying sounds while drawing. It was an amazing childhood, thanks to this miracle language. BASIC led to something called CLIPPER, then I did some FOXPRO, got paid actual rupees to write an inventory control system in FOXPRO, then MFC, Borland C++...all the way upto today.
But it all started with BASIC. Amazing language. Thank you, Dr. Kurtz.
Like several others here, my first programming language was BASIC. For this we owe Kurtz a debt of gratitude.
I know Dijkstra is famous for having said that we're mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration, but you know, I kinda think we didn't turn out half bad.
I know literally zero working programmers who learned programming the way Dijkstra thought it should be taught — not even Dijkstra himself, as Donald Knuth once gently pointed out.
Practically everybody in my generation started off with BASIC. On the other hand, at some point (when?), this practice stopped, and the newer generations turned out fine starting out with more civilized languages.
I also cut my teeth with BASIC. First was on the Apple ][s at school, then I got a Vic-20 at home. A lot of the cooler games for the Vic-20 were just a boatload of integer data you had to type in from magazines, not a very educational experience. Then I got access to an HP system with Rocky Mountain BASIC, which was a pretty sweet system. A few years later I got my first professional experience by working on the RM BASIC port to HP/UX as a tester. ~5 years later I came back to RMB working on a production test management system called Functional Test Manager, and I just had lunch with a guy I worked with on that a couple days ago.
BASIC was, I'm realizing as I write this, an integral part of my career. RIP Thomas.
Like most of the programmers of my generation, BASIC was the first language I learned. BASIC was so pervasive in the 80s and 90s. Nearly every computer came with a copy of some flavor of BASIC. Even my 6th grade math textbook had an appendix with educational math games in the form of BASIC source code listings.
I ended up using multiple versions of basic because the various boot discs we had came with different versions. Off the top of my head I remember BASIC, BASICA, and QBASIC. Not that I remember the differences between the flavors any more.
To add to this, it is revealed in Hitchhikers that dolphins are super intelligent extraterrestrials. "So long and thanks for all the fish" is the superintelligent dolphins farewell to the last of earth/hummanity.
The legacy of BASIC on our industry can hardly be understated. The language and its mission at Dartmouth was innovative.
BASIC had immeasurable secondary effects simply by being the first programming language so many new computer users were exposed to (particularly near the dawn of personal computers).
That manual is a great find! Dr. Kurtz was surely way ahead of his time in aiming to bring computing to the masses, well before the microcomputer revolution. BASIC was an easy onramp to programming that hooked a ton of people on computing, especially kids of the 70s/80s like me. He shaped the future as much as anyone.
BASIC (QB, and VB6) were my earliest exposures to programming.
As a high schooler in 2001, only a very few were interested in learning programming (yes the geeks). Good old times.
Eventually I switched to Java because of mobile apps (J2ME), and still make a living from it.
I was 13 when DTSS was introduced, so never had an opportunity to learn programming with Basic. Fortunately, that didn't harm me, and I've managed to compensate for this disadvantage.
I don't want in any way to minimize the impact of a language designed for non-experts. But, while Basic, and its many limitations, was the best that could be done with the relatively limited systems it was first implemented on, it doesn't scale. I recall, around 1970, building an interactive front end for an inventory system, using a commercial company's version of Dartmouth (or GE) Basic. It came to about 900 lines, and even I couldn't make sense of it.
It's a mistake to believe that non-experts write 20-line mortgage programs, or 50-line dice games. If what you're teaching them has any value, they will naturally want to write programs that grow organically as they understand the problem better. Dartmouth Basic is a language in amber, best understood as what could be done given the equipment of the 1960s, and the understanding of programming development at the time. It was neither better nor worse than other interactive languages of the time, for example, JOSS (which begat PIL, DEC's FOCAL, and even the horrific MUMPS, closer to our time).
I think that the true value of Kemeny and Kurtz's contribution was encouraging programming as a thing for “ordinary” people, rather than a priesthood. The language they invented was developed prior to clear understandings of structured, object-oriented, and functional programming, all of which have something to say even to non-experts. (And, yes, Microsoft continued to produce products with “Basic” in their names, but they have little to do with anything that was developed at Dartmouth.)
So, kudos to all the folks who learned their programming with Dartmouth-style Basic. But I think there are a lot of modern tools that not only help non-experts write short programs, but scale well as their knowledge and skill grows. Smalltalk was one system that demonstrated that, but in more recent memory, Python and Racket are also good examples.
By comparison with film, Georges Méliès did some amazing work in 1900, but nobody would confuse that with the work of modern directors.
(I don't want to get into a discussion of What Is The One True Introductory Language; I have my opinions on that, but they are not relevant here. Instead, I am trying to put the very significant contribution of Kemeny and Kurtz—democratizing computing—into what I see as a better perspective.)
I mean, I don't disagree, but you might be surprised at the scale of systems that were written in BASIC, well into the 1990s and probably beyond that. And not the modern Microsoft Visual incarnation of it but the old, line-numbered, GOTO/GOSUB and everything-is-global classic style.
For a while I worked at a financial company and all their internal systems were in BASIC. They had dozens if not hundreds of internal users, all running on dumb terminals connected to a couple of servers that ran those BASIC programs. This was online transactional systems as well as nightly batch jobs. The programmers were mostly not computer science people but ordinary, smart people who understood the business and did a good job with the tools they had. It wasn't all a mountain of spaghetti, they had put a lot of thought into their standards and practices and documentation and it was pretty easy to work on.
It was used for far more than short programs and teaching.
Learning BASIC on a Commodore 64 as a teenager was a transformative experience. It allowed me to revive the excitement of playing Lego as a kid, but in a scalable way.
As someone who learned most pf what I know about programming in BASIC back in the very early 1980s, this is sad news. We seem to be losing good people all the time these days.
As a teenager I went to a science fair organized by the Communist party (true story and obviously it wasn't in the US). A guy there was explaining how computers works and he took the time to show me BASIC. I wrote my first program that day and found it fascinating. I was enthusiastic about learning more so I asked my Dad for a computer. Said he "Study Math, it's exactly the same".
My next real contact with computers was 15 years later.
Damn, learning BASIC was one of the first things I did after my dad put together an Apple ][ clone. It paved the way for my lifelong technology enthusiasm.
I wrote a lot of QBASIC. 1986-90ish, old Bangalore. I was 12. There was no Mac or Unix or Windows in India those days. Only MSDOS. I had a 386 box. I would insert a 5.25" floppy, boot into command.com, then CD to GWBASIC.EXE and enter GWBASIC. Wrote a lot of GWBASIC to annoy friends and family by emitting high pitched sounds. You could do SOUND 2000+i, j, where i is the frequency & j was duration. You could even control volume from BASIC. I would put that in a WHILE WEND loop and make it go crazy. People didn't know how to turn it off once it got going. Then suddenly one day DOS went away and we had something called MS WINDOWS 3.1 and you had to insert a white round ball into a mouse and click on icons, no more command line, and even GWBASIC was gone, they put QBASIC and it came with snake program. Then I got into the graphics craze. We had a CGA & so I did SCREEN 2, then used LINE and CIRCLE to my heart's content. Few colors only. Then we upgraded to VGA monitor then SCREEN 12 was a full 640x480, I wrote QBASIC to make annoying sounds while drawing. It was an amazing childhood, thanks to this miracle language. BASIC led to something called CLIPPER, then I did some FOXPRO, got paid actual rupees to write an inventory control system in FOXPRO, then MFC, Borland C++...all the way upto today.
But it all started with BASIC. Amazing language. Thank you, Dr. Kurtz.
I know Dijkstra is famous for having said that we're mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration, but you know, I kinda think we didn't turn out half bad.
Practically everybody in my generation started off with BASIC. On the other hand, at some point (when?), this practice stopped, and the newer generations turned out fine starting out with more civilized languages.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Cruelty_of_Really_Tea...
BASIC was, I'm realizing as I write this, an integral part of my career. RIP Thomas.
So long and thanks for all the fish Dr. Kurtz!
I know it is a saying, have read it before, but would prefer to hear the explanation from a person rather than Google.
The legacy of BASIC on our industry can hardly be understated. The language and its mission at Dartmouth was innovative.
BASIC had immeasurable secondary effects simply by being the first programming language so many new computer users were exposed to (particularly near the dawn of personal computers).
Edit: I got sucked into some nostalgia.
Here's the 1964 edition of the Dartmouth BASIC reference: http://web.archive.org/web/20120716185629/http://www.bitsave...
It's really charming, and I think it gives you a bit of the feel for the time.
(I also particularly like, on page 21, the statement "TYPING IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR THINKING".)
Eventually I switched to Java because of mobile apps (J2ME), and still make a living from it.
RIP Thomas Kurtz.
I don't want in any way to minimize the impact of a language designed for non-experts. But, while Basic, and its many limitations, was the best that could be done with the relatively limited systems it was first implemented on, it doesn't scale. I recall, around 1970, building an interactive front end for an inventory system, using a commercial company's version of Dartmouth (or GE) Basic. It came to about 900 lines, and even I couldn't make sense of it.
It's a mistake to believe that non-experts write 20-line mortgage programs, or 50-line dice games. If what you're teaching them has any value, they will naturally want to write programs that grow organically as they understand the problem better. Dartmouth Basic is a language in amber, best understood as what could be done given the equipment of the 1960s, and the understanding of programming development at the time. It was neither better nor worse than other interactive languages of the time, for example, JOSS (which begat PIL, DEC's FOCAL, and even the horrific MUMPS, closer to our time).
I think that the true value of Kemeny and Kurtz's contribution was encouraging programming as a thing for “ordinary” people, rather than a priesthood. The language they invented was developed prior to clear understandings of structured, object-oriented, and functional programming, all of which have something to say even to non-experts. (And, yes, Microsoft continued to produce products with “Basic” in their names, but they have little to do with anything that was developed at Dartmouth.)
So, kudos to all the folks who learned their programming with Dartmouth-style Basic. But I think there are a lot of modern tools that not only help non-experts write short programs, but scale well as their knowledge and skill grows. Smalltalk was one system that demonstrated that, but in more recent memory, Python and Racket are also good examples.
By comparison with film, Georges Méliès did some amazing work in 1900, but nobody would confuse that with the work of modern directors.
(I don't want to get into a discussion of What Is The One True Introductory Language; I have my opinions on that, but they are not relevant here. Instead, I am trying to put the very significant contribution of Kemeny and Kurtz—democratizing computing—into what I see as a better perspective.)
For a while I worked at a financial company and all their internal systems were in BASIC. They had dozens if not hundreds of internal users, all running on dumb terminals connected to a couple of servers that ran those BASIC programs. This was online transactional systems as well as nightly batch jobs. The programmers were mostly not computer science people but ordinary, smart people who understood the business and did a good job with the tools they had. It wasn't all a mountain of spaghetti, they had put a lot of thought into their standards and practices and documentation and it was pretty easy to work on.
It was used for far more than short programs and teaching.
Thank you, Dr. Kurtz.
However
My next real contact with computers was 15 years later.
pours one out