BASIC
In 1964, in the corridors of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz completed BASIC, an acronym for Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. This creation was born from legitimate frustration with the state of computing at the time. Giant, expensive computers required skills possessed by only a few initiates. To program, one first had to go to a punch card center where instructions were laboriously translated into punched cards, then wait in line at the computing center. A single error in the code meant starting all over again.
A former collaborator on the Manhattan Project and assistant to Albert Einstein, Kemeny had joined Kurtz at Dartmouth in 1956. Their first meeting had given birth to a collaboration that would last for decades. Before BASIC, they had attempted to create simplified languages such as Darsimco and DOPE, but these experiments had never really taken off. The idea that drove them remained to make computing accessible to the greatest number of people.
Having become director of the Kiewit Computing Center, Kurtz envisioned an innovative time-sharing system. This system required a language that was both simple and powerful. The two men set ambitious goals for a versatile language that was easy to learn, extensible, interactive, and above all hardware-independent. Drawing inspiration from FORTRAN and ALGOL, they designed a structure that favored common English words. Program lines were numbered, an innovation that greatly simplified editing: to delete a line, one simply indicated its number, and to modify it, one rewrote it with its number.
On May 1st, 1964, at four o’clock in the morning, two BASIC programs ran simultaneously on Dartmouth College’s General Electric 225. This date marked the official birth of the language. Kemeny and Kurtz then made a decision that would influence the entire history of computing: they declined to patent their invention. This generosity would transform BASIC into a worldwide phenomenon.
General Electric, which had provided the computer to Dartmouth, was among the first users of the new language. Around 1970, the company marketed machines equipped with the fifth version of BASIC, without waiting for the next version in preparation. This rush marked the beginning of the language’s fragmentation. Kemeny and Kurtz published their BASIC the Sixth in 1971, but other developers were already creating their own dialects.
Gordon Eubanks, the future CEO of Symantec, developed BASIC-E in 1970, using an innovative approach in which instructions were first transformed into intermediate code before being converted to machine code. This technique foreshadowed the one that Java would use decades later with byte code. Unlike its creators, Eubanks protected his next version, CBASIC, which he marketed through his company Compiler Systems.
The proliferation of BASIC versions concerned ANSI, which recognized in 1974 the need for standardization. A committee formed to define two standards: minimal BASIC and standard BASIC. The process stretched over years, long after the language had conquered the planet. ANSI finally published its specifications in 1978 for minimal BASIC and in 1987 for standard BASIC. ISO adopted these standards in 1984 and 1991 respectively.
The year 1975 saw the birth of Bob Albrecht and Dennis Allison’s TinyBASIC, a marvel of miniaturization that functioned with only 2 KB of RAM. William H. Gates III and Paul Allen created their version for the MITS Altair. Constrained by memory limitations, they chose an interpreter rather than a compiler. This solution, which fit in 4 KB, presented the unexpected advantage of greatly facilitated debugging through the interactivity it provided. Kemeny and Kurtz, initially skeptical of this approach, would eventually acknowledge its role in spreading their language.
The explosion of personal computers in the late 1970s transformed the BASIC landscape. Each manufacturer developed its own version: Radio Shack with its Level 1 BASIC for the TRS 80, Apple with the Integer BASIC of the Apple II in 1977, Commodore with PET BASIC, Atari with its BASIC in 1978. The list grew with Timex Sinclair 1000 BASIC, Texas Instruments’ TI-BASIC, and the Commodore BASIC of the VIC 20 and C64.
In the early 1980s, IBM disrupted the market by integrating an interpreted BASIC into its PC’s ROM. Extensible through loading BASICA, this BASIC accompanied each PC-DOS diskette. Its MS-DOS equivalent, GW-BASIC, quickly dominated the compatible PC market. Microsoft took a new step in 1984 with the commercialization of BASCOM, its first BASIC compiler.
Evolution accelerated with QuickBASIC in 1985, which reached version 4.5 in 1988. The language was enriched with structured syntax, sub-functions, customizable data types, and multi-file management. In 1990, Microsoft BASIC Professional Development System 7.1 crossed the symbolic barrier of 64 KB of memory.
The arrival of Windows once again transformed BASIC with Visual Basic, specially designed for graphical applications. This version, whose “object-oriented” character was debated among programmers, achieved phenomenal success. By the late 1990s, estimates suggested that 90% of Windows software was developed with Visual Basic.
The history of BASIC ultimately tells the story of technological democratization. This language born in a university laboratory accompanied the transformation of computing from a science reserved for experts to a tool accessible to all. It trained entire generations of programmers.