The IEEE has put up a historical marker on the Dartmouth campus honoring the creation of BASIC. Dartmouth News has a story here. The IEEE Milestone marker at the Collis Center to commemorate the creation of the BASIC programming language in the building’s basement in 1964.
If that sounds kind of familiar it’s because the state of New Hampshire did the same thing in 2019, thanks to a drive started by yours truly. putting up what may be the nation’s only software-related highway historical marker on Route 120 (one of many stories here).
I believe the Dartmouth plaque is the second IEEE Milestone marker in the state; the first marked the creation of the first home video game by Ralph Baer’s team in Nashua.
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There was a huge fire of innovation under Kemeny and his legacy. Dartmouth had email for everybody and every dorm room networked in the mid-80’s when such things were still a decade away. Heck, the network ran on home-brewed code that ran on Synclavier synthesizer processors that were made across the River. Students could see 66-blocks full of resistors in the hallways that made the thing work.
These days everything on campus is purchased from far-away big-tech corporations. It was quite a wave at the time – if it could be imagined and excited the minds of the very-savvy leadership, it got funding to build.