In the early 1960s, very few Americans, even college educated people,used a computer. But as early as 1964, Dartmouth College professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz knew computer literacy would one day be a necessity.
That’s why they formed BASIC, Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, as a language set to teach people about computer programming. It was a success at Dartmouth, then spread to other schools. When home computers took off in the late 1970s and early ’80s, BASIC was used? to help launch that revolution. After that, computers became so popular and easy to use that BASIC wasn’t really needed. But back in 1964, Keneny and Kurtz introduced the language code to their Dartmouth class. This all male class was one of the few handful of Americans learning about computers (at that time, Dartmouth was all male).
I’ve always found computer history fascinating, and learning how far we’ve come in technology is why. Fifty years ago, BASIC only had 14 commands. It took another two years before it could accept alphanumeric codes. That’s laughable to us in the 2010s, but in the ’60s, this was radical. It must have caught on fast because by 1967, 80% of Dartmouth’s student body, learned computer science through BASIC. A decade later, a little known company named Microsoft adapted BASIC. What ever happened to that company Microsoft?