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.



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Early Computer Language Turns 40

HANOVER, 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.

I remember it being called "Basic Dartmouth"  God I am old.

BASIC sucks.

COBOL and FORTRAN pre-date BASIC by several years. The thing that made BASIC popular was that it was one of the first interactive languages, which made it a great teaching tool. As far as a language, it mostly sucked.

Brings a tear to my eye.

Sgtar`15

10  A$="HAPPY BIRTHDAY"
20  ?A$
30  GOTO 10

Quoted: I was coding shit in VAXBASIC in 1978 on PDP/11s.

Me too!!  

How big were those floppy disks again? - looking back, they seem like they were almost as big as an LP!  

Geeks, the lot of ya!

Quoted: Quoted: I was coding shit in VAXBASIC in 1978 on PDP/11s. Me too!!   How big were those floppy disks again? - looking back, they seem like they were almost as big as an LP!

8 inch