History of BASIC

Basic
By
Christopher Garcia
Appeared in CORE 3.3, January 2002
In the earliest days of computing, batch processing ruled.

A programmer would take a deck of punched cards they had
punched off-line, give them to the operator and wait,
sometimes days, for the results to come back. The need for
a system where many Users could act as their own oOperators
on a single machine brought helped bring about the BASIC
language.
So, BASIC, the 'Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction

Code', was written in the early 1960s by two Dartmouth
mathematics pProfessors, Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny. The
intent was to have a language that was easy to learn that
could be used on the GE225 time-sharing system that
Dartmouth was about ready to launch. The pair thought that
the most popular languages of the day, including Fortran
and ALGOL, were too complex for non-technical users. Using
elements from other languages, and adding elements like
line numbers to make trouble shooting easier, Kemeny and
Kurtz developed BASIC, at first only having 14 commands,
including the famous GOTO. BASIC could be learned in as
little as two sessions, a tremendous advantage over other
languages that could take months.
The time-sharing system would allow many users to log in at

the same time, running programs remotely via terminals
around the campus in the Mathematics and Science
departments. BASIC may have been the first language written
with the intent of it being used by non-computer
professionals.
Many early time-sharing systems used BASIC, including those

powered by GE machines and DEC PDP-11 systems.
BASIC began to show up in many elementary schools around

the country, particularly in cities where school districts
could use Teletypes to get at uUniversity mMainframe tTime
sSharing systems. Children as young as seven were learning
BASIC as a part of their curriculum. This early
introduction made sure that BASIC would continue to evolve.
When the microprocessor was introduced in the early 1970s,
many of the young people introduced to BASIC in elementary
schools started building computers from kits and went on to
start companies. It should be no surprise that many early
microcomputing systems chose BASIC, especially since Kemeny
and Kurtz never patented or copyrighted the language. The
first BASIC considered to be a full language implemented on
a microprocessor was Li Chen Wang's Tiny Basic, which
appeared in Dr Dobbs Magazine in early 1975.
Bill Gates, then a student at Harvard, wrote a BASIC

interpreter for the Altair in March 1975. MicroSsoft,
released their version of BASIC on paper tape later in the
year, once Altairs actually started being delivered. The
tapes were easy to pirate, as you could run it into your
computer and then punch another copy of the tape on a
teletype. Bill Gates wrote an open letter to hobbyists
saying that software copying was theft, and claiming that
for all the work they had put into BASIC for the Altair had
resulted in income of two US dollars an hour. This letter
was published in many of the computer hobbyist magazines
and was the first time people began to think of software
sharing as piracy. It also was the first time people
started to turn against Gates. Some of the hobbyists
believed passionately in the free sharing of software, and
this letter that began to turn them against Gates and
Microsoft- an attitude that persists even today.
Kemeny and Kurtz, the designers of BASIC, released their

own polished version of BASIC called True BASIC. The two
originatorsprofs believed that the variants of BASIC that
companies had been releasing were altering the basic
premise of BASIC, and the 'True BASIC' was to be the
definitive version. It did not sell as well as the other
versions on the market, especially those made by Microsoft.
Many new systems turned to BASIC for introducing people to

computing. In the 1980s, the BBC used a version of BASIC
called BBCBASIC (Occasionally written to BBasiC by the few
Americans who knew anything about it) for the BBCMicro,
later the Archimedes and many other British micros. The BBC
Micro had been designed as part of a BBC plan to introduce
computers to the general population (since Britain had been
lagging to a degree behind the US in the percentage of
homes and classrooms with computers). The machine and the
variant of BASIC are almost unknown in America, though some
believe that it could have caught on in the US with a
proper introduction. There continues to be a strong group
of users who proclaim BBCBASIC to be 'the best, most
powerful BASIC ever written.'
BASIC began to fade away from the limelight when languages

like C and Pascal were implementedgot good compilers and
interpreters for small machines. The beginning of Object-
Oriented Programming (arguably with Alan Kay's SmallTalk)
and languages like C++ put the final nail in the glory days
of BASIC. BASIC The language still exists today in
Microsoft’s QBASIC and a few other products, and also as
Visual BASIC, an object-oriented language developed by
Microsoft, though it is less popular than many of the other
object-orientated programming languages.
Looking Back
Several people point to BASIC as the gateway language, the

first real language to bring computer programming
capabilities to the common person out of the hands of
mathematicians. Ultimately helping make, making computer
science as a separate discipline possible. John Kemeny
passed away in the early 1990s, but Kurtz continues to
speak and write about the early days of BASIC. Recently
however, Kurtz denied the claim that BASIC was the single
most important advancement in the history of programming.
I'm sorry to say, but I don't think we had much

effect...
- Thomas Kurtz

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Basic

In the earliest days of computing, batch processing ruled.

So, BASIC, the 'Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction

The time-sharing system would allow many users to log in at

Many early time-sharing systems used BASIC, including those

BASIC began to show up in many elementary schools around

Bill Gates, then a student at Harvard, wrote a BASIC

Kemeny and Kurtz, the designers of BASIC, released their

Many new systems turned to BASIC for introducing people to

BASIC began to fade away from the limelight when languages

Several people point to BASIC as the gateway language, the

I'm sorry to say, but I don't think we had much

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