Fifty Years of BASIC, the Language That Made Computers Personal. Knowing how to program a computer is good for you, and its a shame more people dont learn to do it. For years now, thats been a hugely popular stance. Its led to educational initiatives as effortless sounding as the Hour of Code offered by Code. Code Year spearheaded by Codecademy. Even President Obama has chimed in. Last December, he issued a You. Tube video in which he urged young people to take up programming, declaring that learning these skills isnt just important for your future, its important for our countrys future. I find the everybody should learn to code movement laudable. And yet it also leaves me wistful, even melancholy. Once upon a time, knowing how to use a computer was virtually synonymous with knowing how to program one. And the thing that made it possible was a programming language called BASIC. John Kemeny shows off his vanity license plate in 1. Adrian N. Bouchard Dartmouth College. W66xpbyTQ/U4xC6XQCbRI/AAAAAAAAAKI/6BvgpmaErSk/s1600/aaaaaaaaaaa.png' alt='Example Programs In Qbasic' title='Example Programs In Qbasic' />By Ted Felix. Explains most of the QBASIC language in easytounderstand terms. Invented by John G. Tool Inserts Definition more. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, BASIC was first successfully used to run programs on the schools General Electric computer system 5. May 1, 1. 96. 4, to be precise. The two math professors deeply believed that computer literacy would be essential in the years to come, and designed the languageits name stood for Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Codeto be as approachable as possible. It worked at first at Dartmouth, then at other schools. In the 1. 97. 0s and early 1. Download PCBASIC a GWBASIC emulator for free. A free, crossplatform emulator for GWBASIC, PCjr Tandy BASIC. PCBASIC is a free, crossplatform. QBasic Download Most popular BASIC Compilers for DOS full versions, free of charge QuickBASIC 4. QuickBASIC 7. 1 and Visual Basic 1. BASIC did as much as anything else to make them useful. Especially the multiple versions of the language produced by a small company named Microsoft. Thats when I was introduced to the language when I was in high school, I was more proficient in it than I was in written English, because it mattered more to me. I happen to have been born less than a month before BASIC was, which may or may not have anything to do with my affinity for it. BASIC wasnt designed to change the world. We were thinking only of Dartmouth, says Kurtz, its surviving co creator. Kemeny died in 1. We needed a language that could be taught to virtually all students and faculty without their having to take a course. A pro BASIC sign, as seen in a Russian school computer lab in the mid 1. Their brainchild quickly became the standard way that people everywhere learned to program computers, and remained so for many years. But thinking of its invention as a major moment only in the history of computer languages dramatically understates its significance. In the mid 1. 96. You used a keypunch to enter a program on cards, turned them over to a trained operator and then waited for a printout of the results, which might not arrive until the next day. BASIC and the platform it ran on, the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, both sped up the process and demystified it. You told the computer to do something by typing words and math statements, and it did it, right away. We were thinking only of Dartmouth. Today, we expect computersand phones, and tablets and an array of other intelligent devicesto respond to our instructions and requests as fast as we can make them. In many ways, that era of instant gratification began with what Kemeny and Kurtz created. Moreover, their work reached the public long before the equally vital breakthroughs of such 1. Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse and other concepts still with us in modern user interfaces. You might assume that a programming language whose primary purpose was to help almost anybody become computer literate would be uncontroversialmaybe even universally beloved. Youd be wrong. BASIC always had its critics among serious computer science types, who accused it of promoting bad habits. Even its creators became disgruntled with the variations on their original idea that proliferated in the 1. And eventually, BASIC went away, at least as a staple of computing in homes and schools. Nobody conspired to get rid of it no one factor explains its gradual disappearance from the scene. But some of us miss it terribly. When it comes to technology, I dont feel like a grumpy old man. Nearly always, I believe that the best of times is now. But I dont mind saying this The world was a better place when almost everybody who used PCs at least dabbled in BASIC. BASIC Beginnings. Sooner or later, it was inevitable that someone would come up with a programming language aimed at beginners. 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. Dartmouth became that place largely because of the vision of its math department chairman, John Kemeny. Born in Budapest in 1. Jewish, Kemeny came to the United States in 1. Nazis. 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. John Kemeny teaches BASIC to students at Dartmouth not yet a co ed institutionKemeny worked as Albert Einsteins mathematical assistant before arriving at Dartmouth as a professor in 1. He became known for his inventive approach to the teaching of math When the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation gave the school a 5. TIME noted the news and said it was mostly due to Kemenys reputation. The thinking that led to the creation of BASIC sprung from a general belief on Kemenys part that liberal arts education was important, and should include some serious and significant mathematicsbut math not disconnected from the general goals of liberal arts education, says Dan Rockmore, the current chairman of Dartmouths math department and one of the producers of a new documentary on BASICs birth. Its premiering at Dartmouths celebration of BASICs 5. Wednesday. Our vision was that every student on campus should have access to a computer. In the early 1. Ivy League schools with computing centershad never encountered a computer in person. The machines were kept behind locked doors, where only guysand, once in a while, a womanin white coats were able to access them, Rockmore says. 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. 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 1. It was as simple as that. Of course, Dartmouth couldnt give a computer to every student and faculty member Computers were a pricey shared resource, normally capable of performing only one task at a time. Thats why you typically handed your program over on punch cards and waited your turn. Tom Kurtz, who had joined Dartmouths math department in 1. It would divvy up one systems processing power to serve multiple people at a time. With what came to be known as the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, or DTSS, a user sitting at a terminal would be able to compose programs and run them immediately. A schematic of Dartmouths time sharing system, as shown in an October 1. If youre trying to get a student interested in the idea of computing, you need some immediacy in the turnaround, says Rockmore. You dont want to ship a 1. But what sort of programsMS DOS Microsoft Wiki FANDOM powered by Wikia. MS DOSWorking state. Discontinued. Source model. Close source Certain versions made available since 2. Discontinued. December 3. Final release. 8. September 1. 5, 2. Default user interface. Command line, text. Unsupported as of December 3. Official MS DOS upgrade box art. MS DOS short for Microsoft Disk Operating System, is an operating system for x. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1. GUI, in particular by various generations of the Microsoft Windows operating system. MS DOS grew from a 1. IBM for an operating system for its IBM PC range of personal computers. Microsoft quickly bought the rights to QDOS Quick and Dirty Operating System, also known as 8. DOS, from Seattle Computer Products, and began work on modifying it to meet IBMs specification. The first edition, MS DOS 1. The version shipped with IBMs PCs was called PC DOS. Although MS DOS and PC DOS were initially developed in parallel by Microsoft and IBM, the two products eventually went their separate ways. During its life, several competing products were released for the x. MS DOS itself would go through eight versions, until development ceased in 2. Ultimately it was the key product in Microsofts growth from a programming languages company to a diverse software development firm, providing the company with essential revenue and marketing resources. It was also the underlying basic operating system on which early versions of Windows ran as a GUI. History. MS DOS was a renamed form of 8. DOS informally known as the Quick and Dirty Operating System or Q DOS owned by Seattle Computer Products, written by Tim Paterson. Microsoft needed an operating system for the then new Intel 8. DOS for 7. 5,0. 00 and licensed it as its own then released a version of it as MS DOS 1. Development started in 1. MS DOS 1. 0 was released with the IBM PC in 1. DOS, in turn, was a clone of Digital Researchs CPM for 8. Z8. 0 processors, ported to run on 8. CPM, an improved disk sector buffering logic and the introduction of FAT1. CPM filesystem. This became possible because of the increased availability of RAM compared to what was typically available when CPM was designed originally. Originally MS DOS was designed to be an operating system that could run on any 8. Each computer would have its own distinct hardware and its own version of MS DOS, similar to the situation that existed for CPM, and with MS DOS emulating the same solution as CPM to adapt for different hardware platforms. To this end, MS DOS was designed with a modular structure with internal device drivers, minimally for primary disk drives and the console, integrated with the kernel and loaded by the boot loader, and installable device drivers for other devices loaded and integrated at boot time. The OEM would use a development kit provided by Microsoft to build a version of MS DOS with their basic IO drivers and a standard Microsoft kernel, which they would typically supply on disk to end users along with the hardware. Thus, there were many different versions of MS DOS for different hardware, and there is a major distinction between an IBM compatible or ISA machine and an MS DOS compatible machine. Some machines, like the Tandy 2. MS DOS compatible but not IBM compatible, so they could only run software written exclusively for MS DOS without dependence on the peripheral hardware of the IBM PC architecture. This design would have worked well for compatibility, if application programs had only used MS DOS services to perform device IO, and indeed the same design philosophy is embodied in Windows NT see Hardware Abstraction Layer. However, in MS DOSs early days, the greater speed attainable by programs through direct control of hardware was of particular importance, especially for games, which often pushed the limits of their contemporary hardware. Very soon an IBM compatible architecture became the goal, and before long all 8. IBMs hardware, and only a single version of MS DOS for a fixed hardware platform was needed for the market. This version is the version of MS DOS that is discussed here, as the dozens of other OEM versions of MS DOS were only relevant to the systems they were designed for, and in any case were very similar in function and capability to the same numbered standard version for the IBM PC, with a few notable exceptions. While MS DOS appeared on PC clones, true IBM computers used PC DOS, a rebranded form of MS DOS. Ironically, the dependence on IBM compatible hardware caused major problems for the computer industry when the original design had to be changed. For example, the original design could support no more than 6. KB barrier, because IBMs hardware design reserved the address space above this limit for peripheral devices and ROM. Manufacturers had to develop complicated schemes EMS and XMS, and other minor proprietary ones to access additional memory. This limitation would not have been a problem if the original idea of interfacing with hardware through MS DOS had endured. However, MS DOS was also a real mode operating system, and the Intel x. MB of memory address space in Real Mode, even on Pentium 4 and later x. CPUs, so for simple access to megabytes of memory, MS DOS would have had to be rewritten to run in 8. Protected Mode. Also, Microsoft originally described MS DOS as an operating system for Intel 8. CPU and its cousin the 8. Mi. B of total memory address space. Versions. Microsoft licensed or released versions of MS DOS under different names like Lifeboat Associates Software Bus 8. SB DOS, COMPAQ DOS, NCR DOS or Z DOS before it eventually enforced the MS DOS name for all versions but the IBM one, which was originally called IBM Personal Computer DOS, later shortened to IBM PC DOS. Competitors released compatible DOS systems such as DR DOS and PTS DOS that could also run DOS applications. The following versions of MS DOS were released to the public. Version 1. 1. 2 OEM Compaq release of PC DOS 1. Version 1. 1. 9 OEM Zenith OEM. Version 1. 2. 5 OEM Microsoft repackaging of PC DOS 1. MS DOS 2. x Support for 1. MB hard disk drives and tree structure filing system. Version 2. 0 OEM. Version 2. 1 OEM. Version 2. 1. 1 OEM. Version 3. 0 OEM Support for FAT1. Version 3. 1 OEM Support for Microsoft Networks. Version 3. 2 OEM. Version 3. 2. 1 OEM. Version 3. 2. 5 OEM. Version 3. 3 OEM. Version 3. 3a OEM. Version 3. 3. 1 OEM Compaq MS DOS 3. FAT1. 6B and larger drives. MS DOS 4. x includes a graphicalmouse interface. Version 4. 0. 0 OEM. Version 4. 0. 1 OEM IBM patched Version 4. Microsoft released it. First version to introduce volume serial number when formatting hard disks and floppy disks Disk duplication also. Version 4. 0. 1a OEM. Version 5. 0 Retail includes a full screen editor. A number of bugs required reissue. Version 5. 0a Retail With this release, IBM and Microsoft versions diverge. Version 5. 0. 5. 00 Win. NT All Windows NT 3. DOS 5. 0. Version 6. Retail Online help through QBASIC. Disk compression and antivirus included. Version 6. 1 none IBM and Microsoft alternate DOS 6 versions. IBM released 6. 3 also. Version 6. 2 Retail Scandisk as replacement for CHKDSK. Fix serious bugs in DBLSPACE. Version 6. 2. 1 Retail Stacker infringing DBLSPACE removed.