'Our vision was that every student on campus should have access to a computer.' (ItвЂ™s premiering at DartmouthвЂ™s celebration of BASICвЂ™s 50th anniversary this Wednesday.) The thinking that led to the creation of BASIC sprung from вЂњa general belief on KemenyвЂ™s part that liberal arts education was important, and should include some serious and significant mathematicsвЂ“but math not disconnected from the general goals of liberal arts education,вЂќ says Dan Rockmore, the current chairman of DartmouthвЂ™s math department and one of the producers of a new documentary on BASICвЂ™s birth. He attended Princeton, where he took a year off to contribute to the Manhattan Project and was inspired by a lecture about computers by the pioneering mathematician and physicist John von Neumann. Dartmouth became that place largely because of the vision of its math department chairman, John Kemeny.Д«orn in Budapest in 1926 and Jewish, Kemeny came to the United States in 1940 along with the rest of his family to flee the Nazis. But BASIC as it came to be was profoundly influenced by the fact that it was created at a liberal arts college with a forward-thinking mathematics program. Sooner or later, it was inevitable that someone would come up with a programming language aimed at beginners. But I donвЂ™t mind saying this: The world was a better place when almost everybody who used PCs at least dabbled in BASIC. Nearly always, I believe that the best of times is now. When it comes to technology, I donвЂ™t feel like a grumpy old man. Nobody conspired to get rid of it no one factor explains its gradual disappearance from the scene.

Even its creators became disgruntled with the variations on their original idea that proliferated in the 1970s and 1980s.ДЄnd eventually, BASIC went away, at least as a staple of computing in homes and schools. BASIC always had its critics among serious computer science types, who accused it of promoting bad habits. You might assume that a programming language whose primary purpose was to help almost anybody become computer-literate would be uncontroversial-maybe even universally beloved. Moreover, their work reached the public long before the equally vital breakthroughs of such 1960s pioneers as Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse and other concepts still with us in modern user interfaces. In many ways, that era of instant gratification began with what Kemeny and Kurtz created.

Today, we expect computersвЂ“and phones, and tablets and an array of other intelligent devicesвЂ“to respond to our instructions and requests as fast as we can make them. (Kemeny died in 1992.) вЂњWe needed a language that could be вЂtaughtвЂ™ to virtually all students (and faculty) without their having to take a course.вЂќ вЂњWe were thinking only of Dartmouth,вЂќ says Kurtz, its surviving co-creator. (I happen to have been born less than a month before BASIC was, which may or may not have anything to do with my affinity for it.)Д«ASIC wasnвЂ™t designed to change the world. ThatвЂ™s when I was introduced to the language when I was in high school, I was more proficient in it than I was in written English, because it mattered more to me. Especially the multiple versions of the language produced by a small company named Microsoft. In the 1970s and early 1980s, when home computers came along, BASIC did as much as anything else to make them useful. It worked: at first at Dartmouth, then at other schools.

The two math professors deeply believed that computer literacy would be essential in the years to come, and designed the languageвЂ“its name stood for вЂњBeginnerвЂ™s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction CodeвЂќвЂ“to be as approachable as possible. Kurtz of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, BASIC was first successfully used to run programs on the schoolвЂ™s General Electric computer system 50 years ago this weekвЂ“at 4 a.m.

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