Birth of BASIC

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Strong rec nettework · 2024-11 · on “Thomas E. Kurtz has died”

I interviewed Tom Kurtz in 2017. He was so generous, and as brilliant as you'd expect. He wrote me a memo on "Grammatical Simplifications in BASIC." He loved memos--was an academic mathematician at heart, even at 89! It was his idea to make computing accessible--he (modestly) credits Kemeny with all the other ideas about BASIC and the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS). I wrote about the interview here: [LINK] . The Birth of BASIC documentary that Dartmouth did for the 50th anniversary is excellent and features him prominently: [this video]

Recommends ArtWomb · 2021-02 · on “BBC Micro at 40: How it inspired a generation of coders [video]”

I enjoy messing around in the Owlet browser-based BBC BASIC editor. 8-bit graphics still has a place in modern web design ;) [LINK] Related doc on youtube: "Birth of BASIC" [this video]

Recommends WoodenChair · 2024-05 · on “BASIC turns 60”

There's a really good documentary on the creation of BASIC at Dartmouth (made by Dartmouth): [this video] If you don't want to watch the documentary, we did a shorter podcast episode about it: [LINK]

Cites russellbeattie · 2022-07 · on “Ed is the standard text editor (2014)”

For some reason it took me years to understand the need for a line editor. It didn't make any sense in my head. Then one day I saw the famous picture of Bill and Allen as kids in front of a teletype [1] and it finally clicked. The way it worked was like this: As you keyed in your program, letter by letter, it was printed out on the paper immediately like a typewriter. If you ran the program and there was a problem, you'd just read (or re-read) the printout, find the line with the bug, then use a line editor to fix just that line. You might mark the paper with pencil to keep track of the change. After a while if you needed to see the latest version, you'd just print the whole program out, or