RIP Down to BASICs – Thomas E Kurtz

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computerhistory.org

In Memoriam: Thomas E. Kurtz, 1928–2024

CHM remembers the remarkable career and contributions of 2023 Fellow Thomas E. Kurtz, who passed away on November 12, 2024.
computerhistory.org computerhistory.org

In the early days of academic computing in the 1960s, there were no simple non-professional programming languages available for undergraduates. BASIC was aimed at this audience. To realize their vision, Kurtz and Kemeny concurrently developed the Dartmouth Timesharing System, allowing BASIC to be accessed by students around campus using Teletype terminals.​

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First language I learned, on a TRS-80 Model I. I remember walking into Radio Shacks and typing a little program into the machines to enter an infinite loop and print random ASCII characters to the screen, and sometimes being accused of breaking the machines by employees.
 
I learned BASIC in HS on the school district HP2000 that was over on 102nd St and had 30 timeshared ports that we could access using the ASR on a 110baud modem. It would get sluggish around 3pm because so many people all over town were using it. The teacher wanted us to type our programs offline onto rolls of paper tape and feed them that way in online, but no one ever did that.
 
BASIC was my first computer language. First on a timeshare TTY in college, then on an IMSAI 8800 I built, followed by an IBM PC, then on a MAC, and lastly using Zedcor's ZBasic/FutureBasic creating an RPN scientific calculator for my real work on a Mac Iici, and also selling a few.
 
BASIC was somewhere around my third language. Fortran first (at school, submitted to a bureau using ‘mark-sense’ cards), then maybe Pascal.

I learned BASIC one summer interning on a project to write equivalents of pieces of code from a language called CHILL. IIRC it was invented to control telephone exchanges.

There was some international project running. Presumably they thought CHILL had interesting properties, and i guess BASIC was a good general purpose choice that was widely understood. I ran into the local project lead later; apparently, we’d come up with interesting stuff. Didn’t follow up as I was a physics/math major at the time, and not interested in computer language topics right then!
 
A little late to the thread, but here are my experiences...

I wrote very primitive BASIC programs on paper for the C64 that I didn't have, but some of my friends had.

Later, we had an Atari ST at home, which came with ST-Basic. Some called it more of a text adventure than a BASIC interpreter. I believe it didn't even tokenize the source, which made it very slow.
It also had the fault that it seeded the RAND function with the same value at every RUN. Let's just say that I knew the first dozen or so numbers that came up in a simple Roulette simulator that I wrote.

Eventually, Atari replaced ST-Basic with Omicron Basic, which previous buyers could get for free.
Omicron Basic had much more features and was much faster than ST-Basic, but it was in constant competition with GFA-Basic.
Nevertheless, I cannot recall having programmed anything relevant with Omicron Basic. It seems I quickly switched to C and 68K assembly.

On the Acorn RiscPC I dabbled in a little bit of BBC BASIC, since that was integrated quite deeply into the system.
BBC BASIC programs practically got the biggest speed increase with the switch from the 30 MHz ARM610 to the 200 MHz StrongARM.
Most programs were 5 times faster with the new CPU, but since the BBC BASIC interpreter almost completely fit into the instruction cache of the StrongARM and BASIC programs often fit into the data cache, those were up to 10 times faster than with the older CPU.

I wrote very little VBA for Active Server Pages and some Excel macros.

I downloaded Real Basic for OSX, but never actually used it...

I have some fondness for BASIC due to it being my first programming language, but it definitely wouldn't be my first nor second choice for anything today.
 
Cmaier said:
First language I learned, on a TRS-80 Model I. I remember walking into Radio Shacks and typing a little program into the machines to enter an infinite loop and print random ASCII characters to the screen, and sometimes being accused of breaking the machines by employees.
Click to expand...

I did the same with in store c64s, coco2, etc.

Except mine was printing dirty/silly messages on the screen in a loop. I was young :D
 
I used that timeshare system as an undergrad at Dartmouth. Everyone who took calculus was required to write a computer program to determine the value of pi by successive approximation and run it on the system.

They also had a text-based game called "Adventure". A few of us were playing it on one of the terminals in the Engineering library. Normally undergrads weren't allowed on those terminals (they were reserved for the School of Engineering), but we were so focused that nobody disturbed us—until one of my friends yelled "Kill the dwarf!", at which point we were asked to leave.

Dartmouth has a foreign-language requirement--you have to attain proficiency to graduate. They want to expose you to different cultures and perspectives. Because, at the time, knowing a computer language was quite novel, they allowed that to serve in its place. For obvious reasons, that's no longer allowed. [And no, I didn't take that route--I chose French ;).]
 
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