It took 10 months to get it done, but the Granite State is now officially a Geeky State: The latest New Hampshire Historical Highway Marker, celebrating the creation of the BASIC computer language at Dartmouth in 1964, has officially been installed.
Everybody who has ever typed a GOTO command can feel proud.
As you know, loyal reader, I can feel particularly proud. Last August, I wrote in this column that the 255 official historical markers placed alongside state roads told us enough about covered bridges and birthplaces of famous people but not enough about geekiness. Since anybody can submit a suggestion for a new sign, I thought I’d give it a shot.
Read all about it: https://www.concordmonitor.com/BASIC-Dartmouth-Kemeny-time-sharing-historical-26164409
By the way, the headline is an exaggeration. New Hampshire has lots of cool historical markers, covering such important things as alien abduction and latitude uncertainty.
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Congrats David. Nice work!
They are pretty much ALL important.
BASIC ended up unimportant. However, both Fortran and COBOL are still in use. COBOL is prevalent in legacy systems within banking, insurance, and government, while Fortran remains a powerful tool in scientific computing and simulation.
BASIC was a terrific introductory training tool for a very long time – not useful in business (although descendants like Visual Basic were) but useful in the overall ecosystem, to so speak