BASIC

  • Authors:
  • Thomas E. Kurtz

  • Affiliations:
  • Dartmouth College

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGPLAN Notices - Special issue: History of programming languages conference
  • Year:
  • 1978

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Abstract

Dartmouth College is a small university dating from 1769, and dedicated “... for the education and instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes in this Land in reading, writing and all parts of learning... and also of English Youth and any others.” (Wheelock 1769.) The undergraduate student body (now nearly 4000) outnumbers all graduate students by more than 5 to 1, and majors predominantly in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (over 75 percent). In 1940 a milestone event, not well remembered until recently (Loveday 1977), took place at Dartmouth. Dr. George Stibitz of the Bell Telephone Laboratories demonstrated publicly for the first time, at the annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society, the remote use of a computer over a communications line. The computer was a relay calculator designed to carry out arithmetic on complex numbers. The terminal was a Model 26 Teletype.