56 years ago on May 1 at about 4 a.m. the computer language BASIC was born at Dartmouth when “Professor John Kemeny and a student programmer simultaneously typed RUN on neighboring terminals. When they both got back correct answers to their simple programs, time-sharing and BASIC were born. Kemeny, who later became Dartmouth’s 13th president, Professor Tom Kurtz, and a number of undergraduate students worked together to revolutionize computing with the introduction of time-sharing and the BASIC programming language. “
That quote is from BASIC at 50, the college’s 2014 celebration of its role in creating modern networked computing.
As regular readers know, GraniteGeek was instrumental in getting the state to recognize this moment in geeky history by putting up what may be the nation’s first official roadside historical marker regarding software, shown above.
I started the drive for the market in 2018 with this article, which includes an interview with Tom Kurtz.
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