Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That’s when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college’s General Electric GE-225 mainframe.
Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing and inspire generations of programmers over the next six decades.
↫ Benj Edwards at Ars Technica
Even I have used BASIC in the past, when I was a child and discovered QBasic (or possibly GW-BASIC, I’m a bit hazy on the details) and started messing around with it. My experiences with BASIC didn’t lead to a path of ever more complex programming languages, but for huge numbers of people, it did – it’s wild just how many people over a certain age got their programming start with BASIC in the 8 bit home computer era.
I mean, 30 GOTO 10 is such a widespread morsel of knowledge it made its way into all kinds of popular media, such as a few Easter egg jokes in Futurama. BASIC has effectively achieved immortality.
BASIC is exactly how I started programming.
Not computing, that was Hypercard on Macintosh. But I started typing in programs from a BASIC book to build my own video games. One thing led to another, I never made a commercial video game, but started an entire software engineering career.
I am pretty sure many others have similar stories. BASIC was not only easy to program, but it was accessible pretty much on every platform.
(And many will dislike this, but hats off to Bill Gates for making this possible. It was actually BASIC, not DOS that started his career as well).
sukru,
It’s all well and good that he started on basic. but family connections and being independently wealthy probably helped his career a lot more, it enabled him to skip the whole 9-5 rigamarole and bank loans like the rest of the schmucks.
Alfman,
That usually comes up. And I accept he was upper middle class.
That being said, there are probably tens of millions of people in that income / wealth group, and almost none of them go onto building successful enterprises.
It is generally a mix of genuine talent, business acumen, and a bit of luck.
He was able to deliver BASIC to many hardware manufacturers, and MS-DOS to IBM. But of course, he had to get a door in first (thanks to his mom), and had unsuspecting Seattle Computer Products to license Q-DOS exclusively. Plus he wrote an excellent assembler (MASM) as promised on time.
I am not sure I would be able to pull that off under the same pressure.
sukru,
Obviously he can be skilled, but often the real differentiator is privilege. Whether we like it or not being independently wealthy presents greater opportunity to grow wealth without owing others shares and interest. It may be unfair that he doesn’t have the opportunity to prove otherwise, but if he didn’t have such a privileged upbringing with inside connections at IBM, odds are we wouldn’t be talking about him today.
Alfman,
Again, there are literally tens of millions of people with the same, or similar, “privilege”.
I had similar discussions (at another place) about Jeff Bezos receiving $250k from his adoptive father. That is considered privilege by many, however the median inheritance is $266k. Literally half of the people who received anything from their parents have received more than him.
A similar thing can be said for BillG.
This dejected view usually repeated to give people to false sense of insecurity, and lul their abilities to thrive. And unfortunately is very effective.
You’re not technically refusing the point though, the Bill Gates we know probably wouldn’t have happened if not for his family’s wealth and connections.
s/refusing/refuting/
Alfman,
I could say having a good family could be considered “privilege”. However that does not mean a rich family, but a caring one.
As someone who personally came from poverty, my family was the greatest catalyst in my personal success. That is why I might get a bit testy when I see this door being closed to others.
If someone has good parents they are lucky, and they can have much higher change to fulfill their potential.
If not, they should strive to be those parents, and have their kids receive that chance.
It usually only takes two generations for this.
sukru,
Sure there are multiple aspects of upbringing, wealth isn’t the only one although it is a critical one when talking about social mobility. Different people obviously have different opinions about this.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/13/american-dream-broken-upward-mobility-us
I find this to be true. In the west we like to see success vs failure as the product of individual effort. This can be a valid point of course, but often it ignores just how far apart the starting lines are. Winners and looser are increasingly dependent on starting conditions. On the one hand it is futile to complain about the privilege and nepotism, these are a fact of life, but on the other hand we really do need a serious look at just how wide the gaps in modern society are becoming because they are alarming. Our billionaires keep getting more tax cuts meanwhile cities are struggling with huge increases in homeless. the costs of education, housing, food, healthcare are totally out of control. Of course the ethical fairness of it all is one aspect I care about, but even beyond this I fear what is happening to democracy itself in the hands of populist politicians cultivating the anger of social pariahs in an economically regressive state. History does not bode well.
You know the pack drill.
10 PRINT “BASIC IS 60”
20 GOTO 10
10 I=0
20 PRINT “BASIC IS 60”
30 I=I+1
40 IF I=60 THEN END
50 GOTO 20
I started with BASIC too, specifically BBC BASIC (of the 6502 variety). I gather there are still people using it now on old hardware and on Raspberry Pi devices running RISC OS.
BBC BASIC – in both its original BBC Micro version and the enhanced Archimedes version – was by far the best BASIC implementation of the 1980’s IMHO. The fact you could easily drop in and out of assembly code mid-way through a BASIC program was revolutionary for the BASIC language at that time.
I wrote a Scabble game in a mixture of BASIC (for UI calls and gameplay logic) and ARM assembly language (for speeding up board/dictionary searches) on the Archimedes and it worked well (I dared not publicly release it for fear of IP ingringement sadly). Even used it to solve a weekly Daily Telegraph newspaper Scrabble contest (find the highest score given a board position and set of 7 tiles – yes, you could set up a board/rack and have it find the highest scoring move in that position in my program).
I think BBC Basic is still available in RISC OS, which recently got a new release:
https://www.osnews.com/story/139527/risc-os-open-5-30-arrives-with-raspberry-pi-wi-fi-support/
I started with Turbo Pascal 4, by looking over my big brother’s shoulder.
He was following a computer class at school, was struggling with programming, and I hopped in to help. 🙂
There was no BASIC in MS-DOS yet AFAIR, so I discovered BASIC a few years later, and did not like it, as it looked very… basic.
In early 2000s, I tinkered with VBScript, but Windows Scripting Host was much too slow for my needs.
Yet a few years later, I had some fun doing LotusScript work in Lotus Notes, mostly for automation.
Getting structures properly aligned for Win32 API calls was crazy !
Then I got back to it with Outlook VBA a few months back, when the stupid company I worked for started messing with our work email, and I needed to clean it from automated signatures and disclaimers and stuff.
Overall, I ended up enjoying BASIC as a simple and expressive language, and it worked well enough for me, as long as there was a decent development and debugging environment to work in.
Nico57,
I’m not sure what version your brother used, I’m guessing it was GWBasic or some other variation of it where you had to input line numbers. You had to renumber your program listing periodically to create space for new lines, it was crazy how tedious Basic programming used to be before operating systems had descent editors. It was so primitive next to programming in pascal with a proper editor.
VBScript and classic ASP were awful languages despite being newer, even those of us who liked QuickBASIC/VisualBasic felt they were a terrible mess.
You probably would have liked qbasic, which had a good modular editor and debugger on DOS 5+. I used to be fairly good at visual basic but it had it’s limitations, not because it was a “basic”-style language, but because working with win32 functions was tedious there too. This is a big reason active-X components were so popular even though they mostly were wrappers for windows functionality.
Yup, GW-BASIC was my foray into programming, quickly followed by QuickBasic 2.0, and later 4.5, before starting with Turbo Pascal and in-line assembly.