The history of the program language BASIC, 50 years since its birth, and its spirit

1964 (Showa 39) May 1stIs one of the programming languagesBASICWas the first day to execute the order in the world for the first time, BASIC celebrated its 50th anniversary since its birth. "INPUT"Or"PRINT"BASIC succeeded in lowering the hurdle of computer programming much more by using plain expressions close to natural language, such as" BASIC became a wind of the world, but its origin is used in computer education of a university It was a language that was developed for. How was BASIC such a birth and how did you follow it?

Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal | TIME.com
http://time.com/69316/basic/

The creator of the concept of BASIC is a mathematician at Dartmouth University, New HampshireJohn KemenyWith the professorThomas KurtzTwo of the professors were programs developed originally for General Electric computer which was introduced at the university. Both professors have already recognized the importance of computer operating abilities (literacy) from that time and aim to penetrate computer education for students. To that end, we developed "general-purpose symbol instruction code for beginners (BEginner'sAL-purposeSYmbolicINstructionCOde), take that initial letterBASICIt was named.


BASIC used at the school is especiallyDartmouth BASICIt is called, utilize the mainframe computer of the schoolTime sharing systemDesign was adopted incorporating the mechanism of. The highly evaluated BASIC system will be introduced later to other universities and will be popularized later.

It is almost impossible to think at the moment, but the operating speed of the computer at that time is very slow, and it takes a long time to print out the result, anyway it takes time and effort, and that state is "letter It is expressed as "playing chess matches by interaction". Although it was the world of such a computer, BASIC quickly displayed the calculation result and provided very high usability. Although it is such BASIC, it is not necessarily being accepted favorably by all people. In particular, he seems to have received criticism from the world of computer science in particular.

◆ Birth of BASIC
Professor Kemenny, one of the birth parents of BASIC, was born in Budapest in Hungary in 1926 as a Jewish family. In order to avoid persecution by the Nazis, I emigrated to the United States in 1940 and then entered Princeton University. While attending university, I have a 1-year leave of absence to participate in the Manhattan Project, among which the mathematical physicistsJohn von NeumannI was influenced greatly, including studying under a computer, teaching computers. After that he served as Assistant of Dr. Einstein, famous for the theory of relativity for several years, and will be welcomed at the Dartmouth College as head of mathematics department at the age of 29.

The reason why I was involved in the development of BASIC at Dartmouth College was that Professor Kemenny's advocacy "general liberal arts education is important and it should contain mathematical elements, but that It is based on the belief that mathematical knowledge is not necessarily directly linked to results in general liberal arts education, "says Dan Rockmore, current dean of the University of Dartmouth.

When expressing the computer at the time extremely, "It is difficult for ordinary people to approach even experts placed in tightly isolated rooms", but Professor Kemeny said " However, it is necessary to be able to touch the computer "and advocated the importance of it and worked hard to popularize computers. However, since the computer at the time was very expensive and was only capable of doing one treatment at a time, the ideal of the professor could not be realized so easily.

Professor Thomas Kurtz, who joined Dartmouth University in 1956, proposed the solution. Professor Kurt can divide the processing time of the CPU and perform multiple processes at the same time in parallelTime sharing systemBy introducing the concept of, we will succeed in providing the computer environment to more users. This system is especiallyDTSS(Dartmouth Time Sharing System), and is now known as the world's first large-scale time-sharing system.


In the construction of the initial system, it was designed to make it easier for humans to understandHigh level language(High-level language)FORTRANYaALGOLAlthough programming languages ​​such as programming language were used, there is still a voice saying that the rules of description are complicated and complicated. Therefore, Professor Kemeny and Professor Kurt have a form closer to the human language, for example "HELLO"Or"GOODBYEJust entering a language that enables computers to understand requests and perform login and logoff operations and so on will be the basis of the BASIC language after May 1, 1964Dartmouth BASICSuccessfully for the first time.

Here is the initial screen of Dartmouth BASIC (Click here to open GIF animation: about 3 MB). Unlike BASIC languages ​​that are popular later, Dartmouth BASICcompilerwas.


Thereafter, in June 1964, a computer was also opened for students at Dartmouth University, and 11Teletype terminalUtilization has been started with. To the command which was initially implemented, the processing result is output as a teletypePRINTOr describe a conditional expressionIFWhenTHENFlies to a specific line numberGOTOOr the end of the programENDBASIC already included something familiar already. The picture shows that Professor Kemeny and her daughter Jennifer are manipulating the computer.


Professor Kemeny and Professor Kurt prepare the position to use this computer system as open as possible. The publicity statement of "Queit · Computation Center" opened in 1966 says, "Everyone is free to use the facility and can not be asked about its use, even if it can be used for analysis of important research, classes It is okay to use it to clean up the tasks quickly.You can freely play with football games or write letters to girlfriends. "

This way of thinking was "not yet existent"Personal ComputingIt can be said that it was ahead of the notion of such concept that, thanks to that, it also spreads to other universities such as Harvard University and Princeton University to enable processing through the telephone line. Even professor Kemenny was not able to predict its influence then, in the later interview in 1991, "It is possible to provide opportunities to contact the computer, and that it can also be provided to remote places at all It was beyond my expectation, "he says that the scale was very big.

◆ BASIC bashing
Although it was BASIC, which was generally favorably accepted like this, there were opposing opinions in the computer world. The computer scientist in the Netherlands was especially standing outstandinglyEdgar DijkstraHe was a professor.

ByWikipedia

Professor Dijkstra who died in 2002 is known as a strong anti-BASICist, such as saying "About teaching good programming to those who have touched BASIC even once, it is impossible in practice" regarding BASIC It was. actuallyFORTRANAbout "About childish disorder" I call it,PL / IIs "fatal disease",COBOLSince it was criticized as "criminal acts", it was not targeted only to BASIC, but the topic I mentioned about BASIC is that it is possible to jump to any place in the program To "GOTOIt was the function of "sentence".

It is a messy structure, a program organized in disorderSpaghetti codeAlthough it sometimes criticizes it implicitly, the professor criticized the BASIC program where the GOTO sentence is unrestrictedly assembled as the very source of it. There are still many opinions that support this logic, and programs that exclude the GOTO statement are sometimes recommended.

On the other hand, professor Kurt dared to say, "It can be said that some of such criticisms are" turning over the jealousy against BASIC's success ", BASIC argued that experts like Professor Dijkstra It is not intended for the beginner, but mainly for the beginners who enter the programming world. In fact, in 1975 BASIC played a major role as an entrance to the program world.

◆ Popularization of "Personal Computer" and BASIC
Until then it was the world of computers that required large-scale facilities, but in 1975MITSThe first personal computer for the world released from "Altair 8800(Altair 8800) "has appeared,personal computerThe concept that will penetrate the world. The Altair 8800 with the Intel 8080 on the CPU is about 400 dollars to 500 dollars (120 thousand yen to 150 thousand yen at the time of the time) for the self-assembled kit, about 500 dollars to 600 dollars even for the assembled finished product About 150,000 yen to 180,000 yen) The fact that it was sold at a low price such as about) also spurs that trend.

Many people were deprived of this machine, including Bill Gates and Paul Allen who later launched Microsoft. Gates found a possibility of porting BASIC to the Altiar 8800 and contacted MITS and succeeded in selling the BASIC package for Altair 8800 which has not been completed yet. From there eight weeks it took us to actually complete the product,Micro-Soft"(With hyphen at that time) was founded and we decided to walk the way to Microsoft afterwards.


Altair 8800, which was affordable and compatible with ease of use by adopting the BASIC language, was a success, and the following Commodore'sPET 2001And Radio ShackTRS-80, And Apple'sApple IIWas also sold as a model equipped with BASIC at that time.

ByWikipedia

Here is the image of "Block breaking" that was organized by the BASIC program running on Apple II. Click to open gif animation (about 1.5 MB).


A major feature of BASIC developed by Microsoft is described in a human-readable senseInterpreter languageIt was written in. In other words, it means "anyone can see the contents of the program freely", and those who studied the program then refer to the contents of the BASIC program, or in some cases borrow a part of the program as it is It was an era when it was relatively free to do.

With more people learning programming, the world will be filled with a variety of programs. In the days before the existence of the Internet, speaking of the place to publish your own program, it was common sense to call a programming specialty magazine sold at bookstores. In the United States, books gathering the program "BASIC Computer Games" gained popularity, and even in Japan "Monthly ASCII"Or"I / OHigh expertise like ","Login"Or"Microcomputer BASIC magazineHigh magazines with high gaming characteristics such as "gathering popularity."



In addition, as a characteristic of this time, it is cited that each manufacturer adopted BASIC which evolved independently. For example, the command below is the Commodore's "Commodore 64It is a program code that operates only on.

10 PRINT CHR $ (205.5 + RND (1));: GOTO 10

When running this program with Commodore 64, the following maze pattern is displayed, but in other machines it does not work at all, the situation occurred frequently. (Click here to open gif animation: about 4 MB)


◆ To the era of the sky
Although BASIC was showing various excitement as above, gradually its negative influence will be visible. From the era of inputting and running programs by handling the keyboard, gradually shifting to the era where programs are read through cassette tapes and floppy disks,Lotus 1-2-3"For database management,"DBASEThe concept of "packaged software" comes to come up.


Mr. Paul Allen looked back at that time, looking closely at this trend, "At first I thought about strengthening the foundation built with BASIC, but I will immediately tell you what is not such a time I realized that a single application will become the next mainstream we are shifting to the development of applications such as Word and Excel. "

In 1984 Apple released the first MacintoshGraphical user interface(GUI) will be known to the general public, mainly based on BASICCharacter user interface(CUI) will gradually weaken the influence. And in 1990Windows 3.0, In 1995Windows 95As it emerges, that trend will accelerate at a stroke.

Still, the flow of BASIC is not completely discontinued, its genealogy is "Visual Basic", Followed by"Visual Basic .NETIt will be carried over to.

◆ Future BASIC
BASIC, which celebrates 50 years since its birth, is approaching a situation where it seems likely to have reached one turning point. From the stage of inputting and describing the code by hand in the eraObject Oriented ProgrammingTo the era of the era, and furthermore new technologies continue to be developed, it has come to be heard that "BASIC is already antique".

However, the flow of utilizing BASIC as a basis for programming has been inherited. Microsoft is new for programming beginnersSmall BasicWe offer software called.


And above all, what Kemeny Professor Kurtz and Professor Kurt wanted to realize through BASIC means "anyone can use computers". Currently, half of the people who own mobile phones possess smart phones, not feature phones, and considering that their performance exceeds the supercomputer at that time, they wanted to realize the two It can be said that the world is now a reality.

It is no exaggeration to say that the spirit of BASIC, which started from the Dartmouth College classroom, has shaped contemporary forms in various ways.