Birth of BASIC

I interviewed Tom Kurtz in 2017. He was so generous, and as brilliant as you'd expect. He wrote me a memo on "Grammatical Simplifications in BASIC." He loved memos--was an academic mathematician at heart, even at 89! It was his idea to make computing accessible--he (modestly) credits Kemeny with all the other ideas about BASIC and the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS). I wrote about the interview here: link . The Birth of BASIC documentary that Dartmouth did for the 50th anniversary is excellent and features him prominently: link to this video

I enjoy messing around in the Owlet browser-based BBC BASIC editor. 8-bit graphics still has a place in modern web design ;) link Related doc on youtube: "Birth of BASIC" link to this video

There's a really good documentary on the creation of BASIC at Dartmouth (made by Dartmouth): link to this video If you don't want to watch the documentary, we did a shorter podcast episode about it: link

Here is him (and others) talking about the time and background of the invention of BASIC at Dartmouth college: link to this video

…s inception at Dartmouth 2), where you would type each line individually, then if there was a problem, you would edit the program individual lines at a time. I always thought it was an odd until I understood how actually using a teletype actually worked. Also explains why the command to write letters to the screen is called "PRINT". 1. link 2. link to this video…