BASIC, Second Edition (1964) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

BASIC, Second Edition (1964) [pdf]

mirrorservice.org

46 pointsnetworked16 comments

Notice the MAT (matrix) commands on page 51.

When I first came across BASIC in the 70's it was known for three things in particular: (i) being interpreted rather than compiled, (ii) having these MAT commands, and (iii) being simpler and beginner friendly than FORTRAN or Algol.

The MAT commands seem to have been dropped from most later versions.

(It was at first a compiled language, but it really took off once interpreters become available on time-share systems. It was probably that aspect, rather than the syntax, which made it more suited to beginners).

It's interesting to note the usage of the slashed O (letter o) as opposed to the modern slashed zero (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashed_zero ).

Yes, that stood out to me too. I recall there being two competing camps in the mid 70's regarding whether to 'slash' the O's or the 0's. In search of who these sides were, I came across http://www.circuitousroot.com/artifice/letters/characters/sl... which is a useful summary.

Some old mechanical typewriters didn't have the Zero '0', one had to use the 'O' character. That's the historical reason.

My dad's old typewriter also didn't have a number 1 key, so you had to use lower-case L (ie, l).

It reads very Danish.

  10 PRINT "TØ BE ØR NØT TØ BE"
  20 READ A$
  30 GØTØ 10

length of program: ...in general no more than two feet of teletype printout. Teletype feet as a unit of cyclomatic complexity is retro-cool.

As slow as teletype printing is, you probably wouldn't want to wait for more than about 2 feet of output anyway.

You generally had no choice about it. For example, Dartmouth Time Sharing supported the Teletype ASR-33[1], which ran at 10 characters per second. So if you were printing a moderately long program you would need to wait 5 minutes or more.

Also the density of the tape wasn't very high (I'm guessing less than 10 characters per inch). Which means that 5 minutes of printing amounted to 300 inches, or 25 feet. It wasn't really a problem, because the paper tape naturally curled up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33

Imagine two typewritten pages on standard A4/letter-size paper, which is ~11 inches high - that's probably the entire RAM of those systems at the time; several KB at most.

that's probably the entire RAM of those systems at the time; several KB at most

Dartmouth Time Sharing System[1] started out on relatively small computers, but by 1965 was running on a very state-of-the-art mainframe, the GE 635[2]. It had about 1 MB memory. That doesn't sound like much right now, but:

   The 635 version provided interactive time-sharing
   to up to nearly 300 simultaneous users in the
   1970s, a very large number at the time

It's the wheel of reincarnation. What we now call "the cloud" was called "time-sharing" in the 1960s.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Time_Sharing_System [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE-600_series

I love that observation. Here is the reference for fun: http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland...

It looks like they used the GE-235 originally, which only had 8K words of 20 bits each (i.e. 20KB.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE-200_series

Also, much of the actual time-sharing control on those GE's was handled by a separate communications processor (e.g. Datanet-30) with its own memory space and registers.

Here are some photos of students and others using the system at Dartmouth ca 1964. Many show the rolls of teletype paper.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dartmouthflickr/sets/721576432...

This paper from Science in 1968 explains how the time-sharing operating system (one of the first ever, including two CPUs communicating through a shared disk) was "designed and constructed by a team consisting of the authors (Kemeny and Kurtz) and a dozen undergraduate students."

http://dtss.dartmouth.edu/sciencearticle

They write, "This experience revealed that bright undergraduate college students were extremely adept at computer programming, and that with little training they could produce major programs and software systems better than those professionally produced and commercially available."

I like that motto "Typing is no substitute for thinking." in the PDF. Applies equally well today :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com