Dartmouth BASIC - Development History

Development History

Work on the compiler and the operating system was done concurrently, and so the first BASIC programs were run in batch mode as part of the development process during early 1964. However on May 1, 1964 at 4 a.m. ET, John Kemeny and John McGeachie ran the first BASIC programs to be executed successfully from terminals by the DTSS system. It is not completely clear what the first programs were. However, the programs either consisted of the single line:

or were implementations of the Sieve of Eratosthenes, according to a 1974 interview in which Kemeny and McGeachie took part.

The second version of BASIC only made minimal changes, adding the semicolon operator to the PRINT statement and zero subscripts to arrays.

For the third version, the INPUT statement was introduced along with the powerful MAT statements for matrix manipulation and the RESTORE statement for use with READ/DATA. Development continued with the introduction of text manipulation and variables, also known as string variables, for version 4 and true file handling in version 5. Version 6 saw the introduction of separately compilable procedures with parameters; this is the version from which most later BASIC dialects descend. In 1976, Steve Garland added structured programming features to create Dartmouth SBASIC, a precompiler which produced version 6 output (and which formed the basis of ANSI BASIC). In 1979 Kemeny and Kurtz released an ANSI BASIC compiler as the seventh and final version of BASIC at Dartmouth before leaving the college to concentrate on the further development of ANSI BASIC in the form of True BASIC.

The early versions of BASIC were used and tested by other Dartmouth students working in the College Psychology labs in early 1964. The departments shared several IBM card punch machines that were used to run batch statistical analysis programs.

Students working on NSF grants in both departments lived in the same rural New Hampshire farmhouse during the summer of 1964. They often met to share ideas. A notable contribution of these late night sessions was the GOTO statement. The earliest printed versions of the users' manual were mimeographed (with the typical purple print of Ditto machines of the era) and had a pink cover.

Dr. Kemeny, an immigrant from Hungary and chairman of the Mathematics department at the time, eventually went on to serve with great distinction as president of the college. Mr. McGeachie, an undergraduate at the time, was called "Geach" by his friends and colleagues.