“Our vision was that every student on campus should have access to a computer, and any faculty member should be able to use a computer in the classroom whenever appropriate,” he said in a 1991 video interview. Kemeny believed that these electronic brains would play an increasingly important role in everyday life, and that everyone at Dartmouth should be introduced to them. The machines were kept “behind locked doors, where only guys–and, once in a while, a woman–in white coats were able to access them,” Rockmore says. In the early 1960s, average citizens–even those who happened to be students at Ivy League schools with computing centers–had never encountered a computer in person. "Our vision was that every student on campus should have access to a computer." (It’s premiering at Dartmouth’s celebration of BASIC’s 50th anniversary this Wednesday.) The thinking that led to the creation of BASIC sprung from “a general belief on Kemeny’s part that liberal arts education was important, and should include some serious and significant mathematics–but math not disconnected from the general goals of liberal arts education,” says Dan Rockmore, the current chairman of Dartmouth’s math department and one of the producers of a new documentary on BASIC’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.īorn 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 don’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 don’t feel like a grumpy old man. Nobody conspired to get rid of it no one factor explains its gradual disappearance from the scene.
And eventually, BASIC went away, at least as a staple of computing in homes and schools.
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