It’s been 50 years since Basic (OK, BASIC) was developed was first used. BASIC stands for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction code. Drs. John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz pioneered the development of this computer language at Dartmouth.
The goal was to find an easier language than Fortran. (Watfor, a simpler implementation of Fortran was developed 2 years later- which was the first computer language I learned- back in the days of mainframes and Hollerith cards. Why did they teach me that one?) Basic was developed for non-engineers and non-mathematics types. And, it was easier than Fortran. (I can vouch for that!)
I never really heard of BASIC until I was informed one semester that I was to teach a course in BASIC to undergraduates. So, each night I prepared my lecture, making sure that everything I would say and do would work perfectly. To say I was petrified would be an understatement.
But, it all worked out. Because BASIC was basic- and by then, I already knew a few programming languages, so that the structure of a computer program was not new to me. And, this assignment turned out to be pretty good for me, too.
BASIC was also provided free to those who purchased the first portable (yeah, if carrying 22 pounds was your idea of portable) computer, developed by Dr. Adam Osborne (a fellow Chem E). A variant of the program also was the first offering of a nascent company called Microsoft.
But those offerings were long after I used the BASIC programming language to determine how to modify penicillin and how to control my business. The penicillin modification involved me modeling chemical reactors and enzyme kinetics to yield the penicillin variant.
I also wrote a program that did all our accounting and payroll operations. For a three-state entity (with all the tax scenarios) which we used from 1975 through 1990, when we finally retired the program (and its many improvements and variants over the years). It’s not that it didn’t still work and provide us with all the information we needed. It’s that we now needed to let non-technical people run the program and make the entries. While entering information and printing checks were not difficult tasks, the reporting component did demand a fair amount of technical expertise.
Happy 50th Birthday, BASIC.
