Talk:Dartmouth BASIC

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I don't know anything about BASIC, but this sounds like an error:

> Greater Than

> Greater Than or Equal To

[edit] Recent contribution needs review

All of the following material is too informal, uncited, and lacking in NPOV. Haven't removed it yet. Maybe some of it can possibly be saved, moved elsewhere in the article, etc.

The early versions of BASIC were used and tested by other Dartmouth students working in the College Psychology labs in early 1964.[citation needed] The departments shared several IBM card punch machines that were used to run batch statistical analysis programs.

Students working on NSF grants in both departments lived in the same rural New Hampshire farmhouse during the summer of 1964.[citation needed] They often met to share ideas. A notable contribution of these late night sessions was the GOTO statement - as in "it's time to GOTO bed". The earliest printed versions of the users' manual were mimeographed with purple type and a pink cover!

Dr. Kemeny, an immigrant from Hungary and chairman of the Mathematics department at the time, eventually went on to serve with great distinction as president of the college. Mr. McGeachie, an undergraduate at the time, was called "Geach" by his friends and colleagues.

Dartmouth BASIC is best known for giving computer programming a human face and making it accessible to everyone.

[edit] Impact in Industry

DTSS had a big impact on industrial practice. Control Data Corporation's Kronos and NOS, Univac's RTB (real time basic) and Hewlett Packard (and most likely other companies) based their commercial timesharing systems on the BASIC language and interface. In the case of CDC, the sytsem was extended to multiple programming languages (BASIC, SNOBOL, FORTRAN and others) but with the same command and line-numbering system. DonPMitchell (talk) 05:27, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

True enough. You might want to add something about that to our article on the Dartmouth Time Sharing System. -- Derek Ross | Talk 07:18, 13 January 2008 (UTC)