early (original?) Dartmouth BASIC documentation
I've been helping a friend clean out some closets after her husband died - he was like many of us and had a lot of history in computing. While he had already gotten rid of early hardware I did find some interesting artifacts in his bookshelves. One book that caught my attention is "a manual for BASIC" by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz (Dartmouth). It is copyrighted 1965 by Dartmouth and appears to be the original manual for Dartmouth's BASIC. The preface acknowledges an NSF grant for funding the language development. Includes diagram/instructions for using the Model 33 teletype and paper tape! Anyway, just thought I'd share with this group. I imagine there aren't too many copies of this left around. Google search turned up some hits but I didn't see any scans of the book. It's pretty short (63 pp.) Nice keepsake from the earliest days of BASIC... - Glenn
when I did my talk about BASIC at a past VCF East I referenced this book, I have a copy. We also all got a copy of the original BASIC from John Kemeny when he did a talk then. It was a very short doc, less than 60 pages. Bill On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 10:16 AM Glenn Roberts via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
I've been helping a friend clean out some closets after her husband died - he was like many of us and had a lot of history in computing. While he had already gotten rid of early hardware I did find some interesting artifacts in his bookshelves.
One book that caught my attention is "a manual for BASIC" by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz (Dartmouth). It is copyrighted 1965 by Dartmouth and appears to be the original manual for Dartmouth's BASIC. The preface acknowledges an NSF grant for funding the language development. Includes diagram/instructions for using the Model 33 teletype and paper tape!
Anyway, just thought I'd share with this group. I imagine there aren't too many copies of this left around. Google search turned up some hits but I didn't see any scans of the book. It's pretty short (63 pp.) Nice keepsake from the earliest days of BASIC...
- Glenn
participants (2)
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Bill Degnan -
Glenn Roberts