Dartmouth BASIC is the original version of the BASIC programming language. It was designed by two professors at Dartmouth College, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz. With the underlying Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS), it offered an interactive programming environment to all undergraduates as well as the larger university community.
Several versions were produced at Dartmouth, implemented by undergraduate students and operating as a compile and go system. The first version ran on 1 May 1964, and it was opened to general users in June. Upgrades followed, culminating in the seventh and final release in 1979. Dartmouth also introduced a dramatically updated version known as Structured BASIC (or SBASIC) in 1975, which added various structured programming concepts. SBASIC formed the basis of the ANSI-standard Standard BASIC efforts in the early 1980s.
Most dialects of BASIC trace their history to the Fourth Edition (which added, e.g., string variables, which most BASIC users take for granted, though the original could print strings), but generally leave out more esoteric features like matrix math. In contrast to the Dartmouth compilers, most other BASICs were written as interpreters. This decision allowed them to run in the limited main memory of early microcomputers. Microsoft BASIC is one example, designed to run in only 4 KB of memory. By the early 1980s, tens of millions of home computers were running some variant of the MS interpreter. It became the de facto standard for BASIC, which led to the abandonment of the ANSI SBASIC efforts. Kemeny and Kurtz later formed a company to develop and promote a version of SBASIC known as True BASIC.
Many early mainframe games trace their history to Dartmouth BASIC and the DTSS system. A selection of these were collected, in HP Time-Shared BASIC versions, in the People's Computer Company book What to Do After You Hit Return.[1] Many of the original source listings in BASIC Computer Games and related works also trace their history to Dartmouth BASIC.
^What to do after you hit Return. People's Computer Company. 1975.
DartmouthBASIC is the original version of the BASIC programming language. It was designed by two professors at Dartmouth College, John G. Kemeny and...
Kemeny and Kurtz developed the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS), which allowed multiple users to edit and run BASIC programs simultaneously on remote...
carried out as Minimal BASIC starting in 1974, was an effort to clearly define and standardize the original DartmouthBASIC language so it could be correctly...
January 1987 and had little impact on the market. DartmouthBASIC was introduced in May 1964 at Dartmouth College as a cleaned up, interactive language inspired...
The Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS) is a discontinued operating system first developed at Dartmouth College between 1963 and 1964. It was the first...
True BASIC is a variant of the BASIC programming language descended from DartmouthBASIC—the original BASIC. Both were created by college professors John...
associated DartmouthBASIC, wrote their own underlying operating system and launched an online time-sharing system known as Mark I featuring a BASIC compiler...
the Dartmouth Workshop, the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, DartmouthBASIC, and Dartmouth ALGOL 30. In 2005, sponsored project awards to Dartmouth faculty...
the BASIC dialect found on Digital's minicomputers, although some could not be converted and appeared in different dialects like DartmouthBASIC. In 1974...
Introduced in 1964, DartmouthBASIC adopted mandatory line numbers, as in JOSS, but made them integers, as in FORTRAN. As defined initially, BASIC only used line...
advantages." Defining Tiny BASIC for the Homebrew Computer Club, Pittman wrote, "Tiny BASIC is a proper subset of DartmouthBASIC, consisting of the following...
high-level languages were used by professionals. In 1964 they created DartmouthBASIC (short for Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) to be...
Dartmouth Time Sharing System, DartmouthBASIC, and Dartmouth ALGOL 30. As of 2005[update], sponsored project awards to Dartmouth faculty research amounted...
was based on DartmouthBASIC and complies to the American National Standard for minimal BASIC (ANSI X3.60-1978). Microsoft ported BASIC-80 to the 6502...
Data General Nova series minicomputers. It was based on the seminal DartmouthBASIC, including the Fifth Edition's string variables and powerful MAT commands...
in 1968 and available well into the 1970s. Like the DartmouthBASIC it was based on, SUPER BASIC was a compile and go language, as opposed to an interpreter...
the courts. Ken Simms wrote DataBASIC, sometimes known as S-BASIC, in the mid-1970s. It was based on DartmouthBASIC, but had enhanced features for data...
commercial timesharing systems, its interface was an extension of the DartmouthBASIC operating systems, one of the pioneering efforts in timesharing and...
submitted to a compiler or assembler via punched cards, paper tape, etc. DartmouthBASIC was the first language to be created with an IDE (and was also the...
DOPE, short for Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment, was a simple programming language designed by John Kemény in 1962 to offer students a...
Microsystems, AMOS) B32 Business Basic (Data General Eclipse MV, UNIX, MS-DOS) Rexon DartmouthBASIC (see also True BASIC) ProvideX Thoroughbred Software...
microcomputers. The BASICs were patterned on DartmouthBASIC, and thus differ in some respects from the many Microsoft BASIC clones of the late-1970s era. The two...
and a'-z' and, in some ways resembled early versions of the later DartmouthBASIC language. It pre-dated ALGOL, having no concept of stacks and hence...
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