Four decades ago tomorrow, two Dartmouth College professors made computing
history

News Story by Linda Rosencrance

http://www.computerworld.com/news/2004/story/0,11280,92795,00.html?nas=AM-92
795
or
http://tinyurl.com/yuqsx

APRIL 30, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Forty years ago, at 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964,
two Dartmouth College professors -- with the help of two of their
undergraduate students -- made computing history.
While the professors, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz slept, the students
successfully ran two simple Basic programs on two separate teletype
terminals located in the basement of College Hall.

Kemeny, who later became president of Dartmouth and died in 1992, and Kurtz
were the authors of Basic, which Kurtz said went on to be the most widely
used computer language in the world.

Kurtz, who is now retired, talked about Basic, originally an acronym for
Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, in a telephone interview
this week from his Hanover, N.H., home.

Basic ran on the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, a network of multiple simple
terminals connected to a large computer, Kurtz explained. "The development
of Basic was a natural step in a whole progression of computer activities
that began when I arrived at Dartmouth in 1956," he said. "The whole thrust
was to try to make computing easier for people, particularly nonscience and
nonengineering people."

Around 1960 or so, Kurtz said, he and Kemeny realized that the only way to
do that was to develop a time-sharing system that would be especially geared
toward small student jobs rather than the "big research stuff."

"The idea was that a time-sharing system made it easy for students or
anybody else to get to the computer," Kurtz said. "The user interface to the
time-sharing system was very simple. Instead of using things like 'log in'
and 'log out,' we used [simple English-language functions] like 'hello' and
'goodbye.'

...

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Sounds familiar...

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