Friday, May 2, 2014

BASIC is 50 years old

Dartmouth University has announced that: "At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall, Professor John Kemeny and a student programmer simultaneously typed RUN on neighboring terminals. When they both got back correct answers to their simple programs, time-sharing and BASIC were born." They created a whole website, BASIC at 50, to support this anniversary and events to support it. If you're a computing purist you probably despise BASIC, but you can't deny its influence - I first programmed using BASIC on a BBC Micro computer. However, one of my older colleagues believes the history of BASIC is not as simple as Dartmouth makes out saying "Dartmouth always had a good press office."

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