No... not an AR15.com member. The programming language that started the revolution.
I was coding shit in VAXBASIC in 1978 on PDP/11s. I kind of miss the old days. But really, nothing has changed in theoretical programming since then except the advent of object oriented programming. Logic is still logic.
Article LinkEarly Computer Language Turns 40HANOVER, N.H. -- Long before the World Wide Web, Javascript and C++, there was something called BASIC, the revolutionary computer language invented at Dartmouth College that turns 40 this weekend.
BASIC is short for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, and some consider it the grandfather of modern software.
"It certainly in the early days introduced more people to computing," BASIC co-creator Tom Kurtz said.
In the early 1960s, Kurtz and fellow Dartmouth professor John Kemeny wanted to find a way to make massive punch card computers more user-friendly.
"We wanted our undergrads to have experience with computers," Kurtz said. "To us, that meant being able to write simple programs."
For about a year, a team of students wrote out 7,500 lines of code, all to parse complex computations into simple commands such as "run" or "save."
What happened next is something of a legend from the early days of computers. In the early morning hours of May 1, 1964, in the basement of a Dartmouth building, two students performed the first BASIC programs.
With a few simple lines of code, intricate math that used to take a day to compute now only took seconds.
"We had to type in commands," Kurtz said. "The ones we chose were 'hello,' 'goodbye,' 'new' and 'old' -- very simple words."
The idea quickly spread to computers across the world, popularizing the use of home computers.