Basic

BASIC HISTORY

 BASIC was invented by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz of Dartmouth College
 BASIC --> Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
 First BASIC program ran at 2 am on May 4, 1964
 In 1984 Kemeny and Kurtz wrote TrueBasic

John Kemeny (1926-1992)

* Paul Allen convinced Bill Gates to write BASIC for the M.I.T.S. Altair
* This was a 4K BASIC
*Microsoft was founded and ported BASIC to the Apple, Atari, & Commodore
* Next they wrote BASICA for IBM-DOS and GW-BASIC for MS-DOS
* The success of MS BASIC interpreter led to the QuickBasic compiler
* Finally, MS married QuickBasic + an OOP GUI --> Visual Basic
* We are now at Visual Basic 6.0
* BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whosedesign philosophy emphasizes ease of use; the name is an acronymfrom Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
* The original Dartmouth BASIC was designed in 1964 by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire,USA to provide computer access to non-science students. At the time, nearly all use of computers required writing custom software, which wassomething only scientists and mathematicians tended to do. The language and its variants became widespread on microcomputers in the late 1970s and 1980s, when it was typically a standard feature, and often part of the firmware of the machine.
* BASIC remains popular in numerous dialects and new languages influenced by BASIC such as Microsoft Visual Basic. In 2006, 59% of developers for the .NETFramework used Visual Basic .NET as their only programming language.[1]

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History
Before the mid-1960s, computers were extremely expensive and used only for special-purpose tasks. A simple batch processing arrangement ran only a single "job" at a time, one after another. But during the 1960s faster and more affordable computers became available,and as prices decreased newer computer systems supported time-sharing, a system which allows multiple users or processes to use the CPU and memory. In such a system the operating system alternates between running processes, giving each one running time on the CPU before switching to another. The machines had become fast enough that most users could feel they had the machine all to themselves.
Bythis point the problem of interacting with the computer was a concern. In the batch processing model, users never interacted with the machine directly, instead they tendered their jobs to the computer operators. Under the time-sharing model the users were given individual computer terminals and interacted directly. The need for a system to simplify this experience, from command lineinterpreters to programming languages was an area of intense research during the 1960s and 70s.
Origin
Main article: Dartmouth BASIC
The original BASIC language was designed in 1964 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz[2] and implemented by a team of Dartmouth students under their direction. The acronym is tied to the name of an unpublished paper by Thomas Kurtz and is not a backronym.[3] BASIC was designed to allowstudents to write programs for the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System. It was intended specifically for the new class of users that time-sharing systems allowed—that is, a less technical user who did not have the mathematical background of the more traditional users and was not interested in acquiring it. Being able to use a computer to support teaching and research was quite novel at the time.
Thelanguage was based on FORTRAN II, with some influences from ALGOL 60 and with additions to make it suitable for timesharing. Initially, BASIC concentrated on supporting straightforward mathematical work, with matrix arithmetic support from its initial implementation as a batch language and full string functionality being added by 1965.
The designers of the language decided to make the compiler...