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Endless loop : the history of the BASIC programming language
Lorenzo M., CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Philadelphia, PA, 2017. 190 pp. Type: Book (978-1-974277-07-0)
Date Reviewed: Jul 18 2018

Ada Lovelace is widely regarded as the world’s first computer programmer. Did you know that her father was the poet Lord Byron, or that he separated from her mother shortly after Ada was born? Her mother then promoted Ada’s interest in mathematics and logic in an effort to prevent her from taking after her father. In a similar vein, Grace Hopper was responsible in part for the development of COBOL. It is from her that we get the term “bug”: after excising a dead moth that was blocking a relay and paper tape, she said she had “debugged” the program.

After reading weirdly fascinating stories like these in the first chapter of the book, I had to keep reading until I could work out when and where I would learn about BASIC. For in some sense this is a book about the computing milieu, and the characters that abound up to and during the period when BASIC was a popular programing language.

The second chapter (wait for it!) begins with the observation that if it hadn’t been for director Steven Spielberg’s father, BASIC might never have been developed. It seems that Arnold Spielberg worked for General Electric (GE), where he was assigned the task of building a commercial computer; that machine was released in 1959 as the GE-225.

Then, in the next chapters, we learn that John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz subsequently worked at Dartmouth University and negotiated for the institution to acquire a GE-225 to be used for time-sharing purposes. It seems that Kemeny thought Dartmouth could do better than Fortran for teaching purposes, so he worked with Kurtz to design a BASIC compiler that recognized just 14 different statement types (like “LET,” “DEF,” “GOSUB,” and so on). They hired a guy named Bill Zani to assist with implementing that design on the newly developed Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS), and students started using that compiler in May 1964. Later DTSS BASIC versions introduced the “INPUT” statement and included a set of mathematical functions (“SQR,” “ABS,” “INT,” and so on).

Chapter 5 (“Many Changes, Many BASICs”) discusses the subsequent development and deployment of Dartmouth BASIC. Its fifth version was adopted as GE BASIC, and implementations of it were offered on the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-8 and Hewlett-Packard (HP) 2000 computers. Later versions from Dartmouth and elsewhere incorporated plotting and structured programming capabilities. This eventually led to the emergence of American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standards for minimal BASIC and full BASIC.

Chapter 6 is “It’s Not Small--It’s Tiny BASIC.” The Altair minicomputer kit was released in 1975, and Bill Gates worked with Paul Allen to develop and sell a BASIC interpreter for it, marketed as Altair BASIC. Its small memory requirement made it attractive to hobbyists owning Altair and other small machines, and illegal copies of it were widely distributed. Calls for a cost-free Tiny BASIC provided the impetus for the launch of what subsequently became Dr. Dobb’s Journal, and some implementations of Tiny BASIC interpreters were published therein. One of the best-known examples is Li-Chen Wang’s Palo Alto Tiny BASIC, published in 1976.

Chapters 7 and 8 provide some details about the use of Palo Alto Tiny BASIC in Tandy TRS-80 machines, and of Microsoft BASIC (marketed as Applesoft BASIC) in Apple II machines. Microsoft BASIC was also included in the read-only memory (ROM) on the IBM personal computer (PC) 5150 when it debuted in 1981. A more extensive floppy disk version was subsequently released as IBM Advanced BASIC.

Chapters 9 to 12 cover “The Day Microsoft Almost Died,” “BASIC, Widely Distributed,” “Microsoft, IBM, and the Clones” and “IBM BASIC Becomes the Standard.”

Chapters 13 and 14 explain how Microsoft later released a ROM-free product called GW-BASIC, which was further developed into QBasic. The QBasic interpreter was packaged with MS-DOS 5.0 and included some structured programming capabilities; it could also be used without line numbers. There is also a short chapter about Visual Basic.

The book ends with a chapter in which the author submits that BASIC lost popularity in part because there were so many different varieties and in part because programs like VisiCalc offered a greater degree of utility in workplace environments.

I used a Data General single-user BASIC interpreter on a Nova minicomputer while writing my postgraduate thesis, and I’ve retained an interest in the BASIC language since that time. Thus, I found this book intensely appealing. If you have any interest in the history of computer languages, I believe you will enjoy it.

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Reviewer:  G. K. Jenkins Review #: CR146155 (1809-0477)
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Other reviews under "BASIC": Date
Computers: concepts and applications for users with BASIC (2nd ed.)
Nickerson R., HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY, 1992. Type: Book (9780673465535)
Oct 1 1992
Handbook of BASIC for the IBM PC, XT, AT, PS/2, and compatibles (3rd ed.)
Schneider D., Brady, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1988. Type: Book (9780133725827)
Feb 1 1993

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