- Why is what we did at
Dartmouth 50 years ago so great? Well... Let me think about it a second. Computing was coming into its own. But in all of the other
projects that were undertaken by industry and by universities, the target was research and development of computing
ideas and so forth. Whereas, here at Dartmouth,
we had a crazy idea that our undergraduate students who are
not going to be technically employed later on, social
science and humanity students, should learn how to use the computer. Complete nutty idea. (bright piano music) So, it's around 1952 or '53. Don Morrison, who was dean
of the faculty at Dartmouth, under (mumbles), was worried about the math
department at the time. It contained more than the
usual number of professors that were just about ready
to retire and they were all the old-school of mathematics. Don Morrison happened to know Al Tucker at the math department at Princeton. And so he called Al
Tucker and Al Tucker says, "I think I know the guy you need." John Kemeny was born in Hungary
before the Second World War. He was a Jew, lived in Budapest. His father happened to be in
the export/import business and had connections
outside of the country. So, when the dark clouds
over Europe began to form, John's father saw the
hand writing on the wall and got the family out of Hungary. Their possessions didn't
make it, it was that close. - So he spoke essentially no
English, because of his grades, gets put into a sophomore of
a huge, huge, not very good school and three years later,
at 16, he's valedictorian. Over the next 10 years, he goes
from being an undergraduate to being a professor at
Princeton, including his time at Los Alamos, including working
with Einstein and manages to do his army service in
the middle of all this. Gets his thesis completed at age 23. An outrageously accelerated time. Extraordinarily rich period of his life. - And Don Morrison said, "What I want to do is to bring
you to Dartmouth and give you "a completely free hand to
rebuild the math department." - [Jenny] My father is
pretty sure that Einstein and Vandolman recommended him to Don. - [Tom] So, he arrives on
the Dartmouth campus in 1954. - And so we have derived the
mean values here among the-- - V.H. Brown was on old roley-poley guy. Had been around at Dartmouth a long time. He's alleged to have rolled
his eyes like this and said, "Things are going to be
different around here." (chuckles) And lord knows they were. John Vandolman was one of
the many Hungarians who immigrated to the United States
just in time and contributed immensely to the scientific
discoveries in this country. - My father attended a lecture
of Vandolman's at Los Alamos. And it's described in his
book, Man and the Computer, and he thinks it's the only place
that lecture was written up. And in it, Vandolman
lays out the principles of what a modern computer should
be, that it be electronic, that it have an internal program. And it could remember instructions that it could do X, Y and Z. And my father distinctly
remembers thinking, "God, I hope I live long
enough to see such a thing." - Kemeny was back at Princeton recruiting. And I was in statistics at Princeton, not straight mathematics. And he was interested in
getting somebody in statistics. I thought, well, I don't
know, I had no idea what I was gonna do for a life's work. But I remember saying to my wife, "Well, maybe I'll try
teaching at Dartmouth." - There was essentially
no computing at Dartmouth. There was nothing close by. And, Kemeny, in his expensive mode, he wanted to get into the
new things that were going on in the world and about that
time, MIT got a machine called the 704 and he made contact
with MIT fairly early. They were, I think somewhat anxious to reach out to other schools. - So, my job was to act as
a liaison between Dartmouth and the MIT computer center. And it involved taking punch cards, and everything was punch
cards in those days. And put them into a steel box and going down once
every two weeks to MIT. This involved getting the 6:20 train out at White River Junction,
and I did that every two weeks. Went down to MIT and put
the punch cards into the input hopper into the computer
center and hung around for 2 or 3 hours until
the printout came out and then took that all that
junk back up to Dartmouth. Well, I figured out that
the data transfer rate, we talk about gigahertz
and all this kind of stuff, was 1.67 bits per second. That was the data transfer rate. - It was a very slow process. - After a couple of
years, John Kemeny decided maybe it's time to get our own computer. So this was about 1958. So at that time, the... The Bradley Mathematics
building was in the works. How can we get a computer
into the new Bradley building? There's no budget for it. Ah, but there's budget for
furniture and furnishings. Ah, a computer is a furniture, right? Yeah, okay. So that's how they figured
out how to pay for the LGP 30. - The main reason to get the
LGP 30 was the time matter and the fact that it took all day
to get a program done at MIT on a big machine, you could
do things on the LGP 30, which is a quite small machine but you could get results immediately. So the LGP 30 arrived, I
don't know when, it was some time in 1959 before
the building was completed. And so we had to put it somewhere. And we put it in the
basement of College Hall. And John Kemeny got the Science Foundation to provide money to support undergraduate research assistanceships at Dartmouth because we didn't have
any graduate students. Well, the background of this
is, in 1957, Sputnik went up. Okay? Do you remember Sputnik? - [Radio Host] You are
hearing the actual signals transmitted by the earth's
circling satellite. One of the great scientific
feats of the age. - And the United States
scientific community went zonkers. Okay? So the National Science Foundation developed all kinds of programs to support science instruction in the universities, graduate level and undergraduate level. Kemeny was Johnny on
the spot, and he would go to places like the Bronx High School of Science and recruit students to come to Dartmouth if they were good in math. I mean, cultures recruit football players, Kemeny recruited students. - One of the people who was
new in the fall of 1960, was George Cook, who was a person Kemeny
had specifically recruited. George's job was to prepare a program in connection with the
1960 presidential election. The idea was the LGP 30
would be used to predict New Hampshire on the basis
of the initial returns. On election night, he was in
the computer center in the basement of College Hall
and I tagged along to watch. So I watched over his
shoulder as he did all these great things and produced
all of these numbers. - And so I think we
were up all night in the room with the LGP 30 running
the state aid as it was coming in from the WDIC reporters
and making these predictions. (lively orchestral music) - [Reporter] The headquarters
of the major television networks are equipped
with entire batteries of tabulating machines. And with electronic computers
to forecast the trend of the election on the
basis of early return. - [Anthony] My memory is that at 9:30, that evening, the LGP 30 made a prediction
of who was going to win in New Hampshire, and NBC made the opposite prediction. I don't know which way that went, but I do know that the LGP 30 was correct. - I remember Bob Hargraves
was a physics student. But he wrote a very
interesting program, basically it was a higher level
language interpreter. - DART was in an attempt, and
it was a successful attempt, to put together a language
not quite as good as Fortran, but a simple enough language
that one could do arithmetic, like A equals B plus C divided by seven or have a square root
or something like that. And I put together an idea
for that kind of a language and actually wrote a whole
compiler for the LGP 30. And I remember going to a
couple of meetings for the royal BLGP users conference
and that sort of thing. And they were all sort of
surprised that you could do things like that on the
little machine that they had used as one step up from
the tabulators in order to calculate insurance premiums
and things like that. After I got that one done,
Steve Garland came and he said, "Gee, if Hargraves can
do DART, I can do ALGOL." Which was a much more difficult language and he did indeed make
ALGOL run on the LGP 30. - Tom primarily had the idea
that it was important to have a higher level language
running on the LGP 30. So the question was, not whether there should be
one but which one should it be. So there surely was a
lot of respect in the emerging computing community
for this language, ALGOL 60. But I think the biggest impact
of it was that it showed Tom and also John Kemeny that
you could make competition available to undergraduates
in an undergraduate course and they could use it to
enhance their learning. And so that prompted Tom
and John to think about how could we make it
more widely available. How could we accommodate more students? (jaunty piano music) At one point, I could
remember being down at MIT. I was still going down
to MIT once in a while. John McCarthy, famous in
artificial intelligence, had been at Dartmouth and
went to MIT because they had better computing facilities
at the time that he went. And he said, "You guys
should do time sharing." Okay. What was time sharing? So, time sharing was an
idea, instead of running one job to completion and
then putting the next job in, was a way of running
one job for one second and then doing something
so that the next job would get it running it for one second. And the next job, the
third job, for one second. In this way, if you had a small job, you could get the results quickly. And if you had a big job, you had to wait, just as in the old days. Well, all we had was
the LGP 30 at the time. We can't do time sharing on
the LGP 30, it's just too small a machine and the input/output
is just too difficult. So I came back to Dartmouth
and I talked to John Kemeny and I said, "John McCarthy thinks we
ought to do time sharing." So, Kemeny said okay. - Well, at some point the notion was raised that Tom and
I would go to Phoenix to... Well, as I understood it, try to talk to GE into
giving us a free computer. I didn't know how the trip
to Phoenix was supposed to result in a computer being
handed over to Dartmouth, but the airplane ride was long and I had a lot of chance to talk to Tom. I think as I reconstruct matters, it must be that on the airplane
I jotted down something in the way of a blocked
diagram, how this might work. - GE couldn't have cared less
of how we were going to do it. We were treated as customers. So that was kind of an
experiment that led nowhere. We decided to do the
right thing and invite other companies to submit proposals. And the companies were IBM,
General Electric, of course, National Cash, Bendix
and Burroughs, I believe. So it turned out that
the GE proposal was much more in line with what
we were planning to do. Not only was it the best
equipment for our purposes, in terms of what it
could do architecturally, but it was also the cheapest. So it was a non-issue. And we put in a letter
of intent to GE in the summer of 1963 sometime
or other in the fall. At that time, the NSF was funding purchase of computers by universities. So we put the proposal in and for the computer purchase proposal, we were going to develop a
time sharing system using undergraduate students as programmers. And the peer review was,
you can't have undergraduate students writing software
for a major computing system. Fortunately, Kemeny
had such good relations with the people at the Science
Foundation that in spite of these slightly negative
reviews, they funded us. The whole project was governed by the idea of introducing computing to everybody on the Dartmouth
campus or nearly everybody. To that end, what we had to do was to make a computer system that was easy to use for everybody. Easy to use. And of course that meant time sharing. We also had to invent a
computer programming language that was also easy to
learn and easy to use, and that, of course, was BASIC. - I expected, and I think
others expected that ALGOL 30 would become the language
used at Dartmouth. But this turned out not to be the case. Kennedy didn't like ALGOL. - And I know I looked
at two of the languages that were around at the time. With the idea of making simplified subsets of those languages, it could
be used for our project, and I couldn't do it, because
if you made them simpler, it was a different language. - So at early stage there, Kemeny was thinking in
a different direction. - I quickly came to the
decision that Kemeny was right. We needed a new language. - So I was coming at it from
an standpoint of somebody intensely interested in
undergraduate education. And his skill was
simplifying things so that it could be understood by ordinary people. And this is from a different
context, but I remember talking later on when I was on
the faculty at Dartmouth, the topic of alumni
college that summer was, where have all the heroes gone? John gave a one hour lecture
on his hero, Albert Einstein. - I put an outline of my lecture
on the blackboard for you in case you're taking notes.
(students laugh) Those are the five parts of my lecture. - And the lecture started
out with him reminiscing about what it was like
when he was in the graduate school in Princeton, and
what Einstein was like as a person and what it was
like to work for Einstein. Weaving in things about
his days at Los Alamos and stuff like that, and
then he started to say, well, Einstein, of course, was noted
for the theory of relativity. Of course everybody knows the
equation E equals MC squared. This was getting to be
about halfway through the hour lecture. And then he started
doing a little bit more, "Well, let's look at this
little more carefully. "Where does he come up with
an idea like this from?" And about 40 minutes
into the hour lecture, I get this sinking feeling
in the pit of my stomach that John is about to try
to prove E equals MC squared to a group of Dartmouth alumni
who know no mathematics. And lo and behold, he
pulls it off. (chuckles) He somehow isolated out
the essential parts of it and put it in a language
that people could understand. You came out of there thinking that you could've proved it yourself. - That, of course, is
Einstein's single-most, best-known result.
(students applaud) - John was convinced that
things could be made simple and that's the real origin of BASIC. - So we're getting involved
in this project and he probably thought to himself, "I'll bet I could write a compiler." You know, a compiler is a big program. 3,000 lines of code. "I'll bet I could write a compiler." And he could. And so he did. And he started that in, I
think the summer of 1963, and he hired a young man
from the Tuck school, a young Tuck school
student named Bill Zani, to do some test run on it. - He'd wake up at three or four AM and work two hours doing the programming. And he would come in with the code and I'd meet him at 8:30,
nine o'clock in the morning. He would go over it with me. And it would be handwritten. I would then have to put into punch cards of
that code to be read into the GE computer in Linn. - And if any computer scientist
was to take a look at that compiler, it was hard to
understand, hard to maintain. Only somebody with John's
brilliance could have controlled a beast of that complexity
and made it work. - During that summer we
got a lot of it working but there were still a
lot of problems with it. But the first time that
I thought it was working successfully was when we could enter in a halfway decent sized program and get the results we anticipated. And I can tell you for sure, I was the first man to see BASIC run. My claim to fame. (relaxed jazz music) - I had a scholarship. But as part of the scholarship,
it was a scholarship where you had to do something
useful to the college during the academic year. My freshmen year, I ended
up working in the library, the math library, which meant sitting behind a desk and doing nothing. So it wasn't bad, but it
wasn't very interesting. And so the next year, again,
I can't remember what the list was of things that I
could choose, but one of them was, well, you can work on
this computer project which caused me to ask, "what's a computer?" - There was a meeting. Mike Busch was there, John
McGeachie, I was there. And Tom handed out manuals
for the DATANET 30. - So we each had to write some actual code as part of the exam to
see how well we did. - Mike had some sort of
programming experience. So, he wrote by far the best
DATANET-30 executive program for scanning the serial lines and ever-after, he was
the DATANET-30 programmer. - And so we were learning
how to write or build what became called an operating system. They didn't have one. I don't think anybody had one
at that point, so that was what building the Dartmouth
Time-Sharing System meant. - Some of my earliest
memories of the project are Tom Kurtz had a couple of memos. Memo number 0 was a memo on memos. And then memo number one was
procedures for the time sharing system, in which he laid
out a lot of the principles including, wherever there was
a choice between simplicity and another approach,
take the simple approach. - The computer arrived, I
think it was in February of 1964, and the two
students who were writing the operating systems for
the computers, Mike Busch and John McGeachie, had a
real computer to work with. - Working on the code long
before the computer arrives is actually quite hard to do because you don't really
know if it's going to work. - It helps to have some
other people around that might be experts,
but we didn't have much in the way of experts at that time. - So there was a lot of hand coding and hand analysis that went on. When the computers came,
then it became real. It took the GE engineers maybe a month to get it all up and running. And then we were on it in the sense that the undergraduates who were part of the student assistantship program, basically had priority of access to the machine. And it was, for all intents
and purposes, it was our machine, which we
shared with John Kemeny. - I remember in the
basement of College Hall, handing professor Kemeny a
card that my BASIC program, he running it through the
card reader at the console of the GE 225 and then together
we would go over to look at the printer, he hoping
that his BASIC compiler did the right thing, me
hoping that my BASIC program did the right calculation. And it was a glorious experience. - The whole time sharing
system revolved around the DATANET 30 and the GE 225. Sort of talking to each other
on a very frequent basis. - They weren't really built
to do what we had in mind. There was nothing built
to do what we had in mind. - I spent an extraordinary amount of hours at College Hall trying
to make things work. - At the time, we didn't know that this was
supposed to be impossible. We didn't know how, or I
didn't know how revolutionary this was going to be. Kemeny and Kurtz clearly had some vision but I as a freshmen
and sophomore was just, you know, this is fun. - May 1st, of course, is a
signal day in all of this. John McGeachie and Mike
Busch were working on the operating system for the GE
hardware which involved the operating system for two
separate computers and a storage device which was
accessed by both of them. It was quite a complicated
thing that it had to do. And the BASIC compiler
had already been written by John Kemeny and as part of this mix. But John McGeachie and Mike Busch didn't have to work with that. They just had to use it. So, on May 1st, overnight, they were working all night. And we say four AM in the morning, we don't know really when
it was, that's a wild guess. What happened was they got
the operating system to work, running a simple BASIC program on separate teletype
machines at the same time. So we call it the birth of BASIC, but it would be just as
legitimate to say it's the birth of DTSS, the Dartmouth
Time-Sharing System. - What really happened on May 1st was a clear proof of concept. A clear demonstration that
all the work that had gone into the thinking about
whether or not one could actually share a machine
amongst several people, the thinking about whether this
simple language would work. All of that was proved correct. And then from then on,
it was merely a matter of improving it, expanding
it and making it reliable. (upbeat music) - In the fall of '64, we were invited to make
a presentation at AFIPS. It was a big deal of computer
people in San Francisco. There was a room of maybe
2,000 people in the room. We hooked up the acoustic
coupler on with the handset, and we linked up the Model 33 teletype to Hanover, we got the dial tone. And all of this was videotaped
on a screen for the audience. And we were entering programs in it and lo and behold, up comes the answers
and shown on the screen. And everybody went bananas on this simple BASIC language being compiled and run in San Francisco over ordinary telephone
lines in the computers in College Hall in Hanover. And we were bombarded with
questions of what it was. And that's the first time
I really got to see the impact of what the
Dartmouth time sharing had. - We had taken a fairly expensive computer that could only be used
by one person at that time and converted it into something
where it wasn't just 30 users who could use it, it
was 30 undergraduate students using this computer simultaneously, writing programs, getting answers quickly. It was a combination of immediacy and simplicity that had
not previously existed. - I know Kemeny was pushing
everybody in their beginning math classes to do
something with a computer. - Will be the solution of a quintet, or fifth-degree equation. This is particularly interesting because-- - [Man] If this had been built
on a language like ALGOL or Fortran, instead of teaching
students in two or three hours how to use BASIC, one would
have spent easily a full week trying to have them
understand ALGOL and Fortran and a lot of students
would've just lost interest. - Writing this program in
BASIC is your next assignment. - So this was the first, to
my understanding, large scale effort in undergraduate
education for computing. - [Reporter] Today, approximately
85% of all Dartmouth undergraduates make use of the computer. Students in more than 100 courses, ranging from the sciences and mathematics to economics, education and psychology, to languages and sociology,
to make direct use of the system in completing
course assignments. - So we had many different
faculty members in many departments who
were doing more and more. - [Reporter] Instructor Wade
is also using the computer in the study of Latin,
poetry and prose style. As well as preparing elementary exercises in beginning Latin. - I would say that it was certainly a revolution for
people that were involved in it because people could
actually get things done. People would come up with their own idea. "Hey, I have a computer, "and I have a right to use that computer, "and I can use it for anything I want." And they would. - Very quickly after the
Dartmouth Time-Sharing System became available,
people were making games. (chuckles) It was a leading sign of
what was going to happen. - Then we wrote a program
that emulated football that would run on the computer. It was very popular with
the students because you could sit there and call the plays. You could pick simple run, tricky run. Short pass, long pass. Punt. - Somewhere during the
game, there would be a dog on the field who'd come up. You know, that game
would have to be delayed. Had nothing to do with
the game, but that always happened at a real football
game so we put it in there. - [Steven] Turned out that
an awful lot of the terminals started getting more use
because lots of students hear, there's this great football game. - Qubic was another one. You have a three-dimensional
tic tac toe on a four by four by four board, people will
keep writing programs for that. - We didn't care what
the students did with it. And they did a lot of interesting things, I'm sure, that we never heard of. - [Man] In the Fall of
1964, Kemeny I think was on the school board of
Hanover High School. And he arranged for Hanover
High School to have a teletype. - We learned pretty quickly
that high school students were just as eager and just as good as undergraduates at writing programs. - We grow up, I think, as
the first computer kids. Kids who had computers
accessible on demand. - Then before you knew it,
you needed to know something about computing, ask your kid. - [Man] Pretty soon, we
had hundreds of users. - There was a big phone company
follow them and they had to add new trunk lines into
the town of Hanover. - Well, they just bought New England. Bought time on Dartmouth
Time-Sharing System on the 235 system that was running in the basement of College Hall, later in the computer center. - [Tom] The interesting thing
about the architecture of it, it was designed to hold a big computer. So there was a big central computer room with glass doors at the front and the back so everybody would come in and see this wonderful computer machine sitting there. - I can remember tourists
coming through key wit, the admission tours
pointing out that this was the largest computer in the world, you could see through the glass. I also had heard that key wit was third on the Kremlin's list,
right after the Pentagon and Sac, Omaha. That the big tree outside
key wit and the round planting tipped up, that
was the missile silo. - I once estimated that even before Bill Gates got into the action at all, five million people in the world knew how to write programs in BASIC. There were something like 80
time sharing systems in the United States that offered
BASIC as one of their languages. And it was all over the world. I even got a letter from
somebody in Syberia. A student in Syberia
wrote me a letter once. This is before Gates, BG. - No, I was here when key wit was built and I was there when I tore it down. I was kind of sorry to
realize that I had not only outlived an operating system,
I outlived a building. - Looking forward 20 years, I'm quite certain that
the coming of the computer will have a significant
effect on all businesses and most private lives. Whether these effects
will be fully favorable, as they could be, or in-part harmful, will depend on whether those
who make policy decisions are aware of what computers
can do and what they cannot do. - There's a couple of
things that make the story of Dartmouth time-sharing
and BASIC interesting. First of all, it was
the first effort in the history of computing to
try to bring computing and make it simpler and
bring it to the masses, so that the masses could use it. - Kemeny was amazing. A visionary. He had a view of where we all
ought to be computer literate. Before most of us even realized
that computers existed. - The second thing that was
interesting about it was, it was all done by undergraduate students. Nowhere else do I know of
in the history of computing, has something like this been done. - As I grew up and
worked in organizations, I realized that this was
the most incredible example of what's called an aligned team. - I've had a few super teams in my career, but looking back on it,
that Dartmouth team, is probably the most
incredible experience, particularly considering it
was entirely undergraduates. - Oh, the third thing is,
it was done at Dartmouth. - [Kemeny] I hope the thousands
of students I have taught and the contribution I
made to their education has to be my number one contribution. Secondly, things I did to
bring Dartmouth to forefront of computing, which I hope
is a contribution both to Dartmouth and indirectly to the nation. (peaceful music) - [Robert] Kemeny was very helpful to me in my last year at Dartmouth, I took a course from him. The night before the final exam, I found out by telephone and my mother that my father had died that day. Kemeny spoke to me and said that I should skip the final
exam and take it in the summer. And that all worked out all right. But then there was a
question of the money. So, my father having died, there was no money, neither
for tuition nor for room. Well, Kemeny wrote letters to the appropriate
officials at Dartmouth, and I was given a
scholarship for a $1,000, and an offer of a loan. In addition, somehow
magically I got an offer from Bob and Anita Norman of
free rent in their basement. Meanwhile, in 1962, Tom had hired a secretary for the summer, and that secretary ended
up as my wife, Susan. Kemeny found out that
Susan did not complete the requirements for graduation from the University of Maryland
and he arranged for her to be accepted by the summer school. And as you may know, summer
schools like to make money. They don't give away free anything. I think Kemeny paid the tuition himself.
Something about their accomplishments and proudness made me tear up.
Then it came the credits...
How inspiring. Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code came about from the work of computer scientists, mathematicians, and other researchers during the 50s and 60s, especially as they launched the golden years of artificial intelligence.
Basic was awesome... I programmed like crazy with basic... With C++ I started more to think how to "organize" things...
Basic was extremely expressive... Probably coming from the attempt to canonize what program languages/machines do under one language.
i spent long hours writing Zork-style games on my school's TRS80 and my MC10 in BASIC.
Just for fun, I've been reverse engineering Applesoft BASIC, and it's truly amazing how much they're able to cram into such little space. Even the tokenizer is cleverly done.
Ah, good old BASIC. I learned it from a library book before I even had a computer (a looong time before the internet), used to write small programs down on paper and wonder if they'd work. When I later saved up enough from a paper round to buy a ZX81 it's hard to describe how exciting it was back then just to type simple programs in and see them run. I was hooked for life.
My first programming job was with BASIC too. Not as bad as it might sound, it was a modern version which had most of the features from languages like C and Pascal (struct types, named functions, switch..case, etc) and a compiler which produced standalone executables.
There are many better languages today, and I haven't touched it for decades, but I'll always have fond memories of BASIC.
I spent my high school years learning Basic and writing my own software. Spread sheet's, a notepad type program, games. Oh the memories are flooding back.
I miss the days I wrote very simple games in QBasic on DOS 6.
Even today you can't beat BASIC when you need a quick little program to actually accomplish a task today.