In computer news this week, 02/26/2002

In computer news this week, 02/28/2002

The Basic part of the microcomputer revolution, and what happened to it.

The microcomputer revolution never would have happened without the involvement of many key companies and corporations, including the Intel corporation who created the first microprocessor chip, a man named Ed Roberts of Albequerque New Mexico who marketed the world's first personal computer kit, and a couple computer geeks named Bill Gates and Paul Allen of Microsoft.

Microsoft's computer language - Basic - ran on the first personal computer and made it useful. They soon modified BASIC to run on all the first and 2nd generation computers, and it was an integral part of the first IBM pc introduced in 1982. Basic was a part of dos and windows for several generations.

But most people don't know that Microsoft didn't invent Basic, they just copied it - as Basic was in the public domain.

Basic was developed at Dartmouth College back in the 1960's by Professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. They had been working on the development of a simplified computer programming language for several years, and their previous efforts had included Darsimco (Dartmouth Simplified Code), which wasn't a success - and if you can believe it - a language they actually named DOPE - Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment. These guys must have had a sense of humor ....

In the early 1960s, John Kemeny believed a new language was necessary to enable non-science students to use computers. In addition, for the time-sharing to be successful, the new language would need to be simple. Thomas Kurtz; however, felt that a subset of the FORTRAN or ALGOL languages could be used. While attempting to change FORTRAN, they realized the result would in fact be a new language, and the two men then began work on BASIC.

When they were designing BASIC, Kemeny and Kurtz listed eight features they wanted their language to have:

	be easy for beginners to use
	be a general-purpose language
	allow advance features to be added for experts (while keeping the language simple for beginners)
	be interactive
	provide clear and friendly error messages
	respond fast for small programs
	not require an understanding of computer hardware
	shield the user from the operating system

Up to this date, many of the early computer languages like assembler required programmers to have an understanding of both the computer hardware and operating system.

Because Basic so simple, Kemeny and Kurtz felt a student should be able to write a program after only three classroom lecture sessions. Students, however, thought the third lecture was a waste of time, so it was eliminated.

Perhaps the most interesting fact related to Basic is that Kemeny and Kurtz never protected it by copyright or patent, preferring to let it be in the public domain so it would be readily available to all people. And it was taken and copied freely by many entrepeneurs who went on to make millions of dollars off it, included Microsoft.

Of the Microsoft version of BASIC, Kemeny and Kurtz said, "A remarkable achievement, but disastrous to the BASIC language. Compromises had to be made, to be sure, but among the compromises were many mistakes."

Details of the history and evolution of Basic may be found at:

http://www.digitalcentury.com/encyclo/update/BASIC.html

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

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