subtitles from Birth of BASIC video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYPNjSoDrqw

BirthofBASIC.srt.txt

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>> Why is what we did at
Dartmouth 50 years ago so great?

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Well, let me think about it a second.

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Computing was coming into its own.

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But in all of the other projects that were
undertaken by industry and by universities,

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the target was research and development
of computing ideas and so forth.

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Whereas, here at Dartmouth, we had
the crazy idea that our students,

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our undergraduate students who are not going to
be technically employed later on, Social science

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and humanity students, should
learn how to use the computer.

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Completely nutty idea.

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[ Music ]

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So it's around 1952 or '53, Don Morrison
who was dean of the faculty at Dartmouth

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under [inaudible] was worried about
the math department at the time.

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It contained more than the usual number of
professors that were just about ready to retire

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and they were all in the
old school of mathematics.

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Don Morrison happened to know Al Tucker
at the math department in Princeton.

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And so he called Al Tucker and Al Tucker
says, "I think I know the guy you need."

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John Kemeny was born in Hungary before
the Second World War He was a Jew,

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lived in Budapest.

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His father happened to be in
the export/import business

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and had connections outside of the country.

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So, when the dark clouds over Europe began
to form, John's father saw the hand writing

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on the wall and got the family out of
Hungary, their possessions didn't make it.

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It was that close.

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>> So, he spoke essentially no English because
of his grades gets put into a sophomore

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of a huge, huge, not very good school and
three years later, at 16, he's valedictorian.

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You know, over the next ten years he goes from
being an undergraduate to being a professor

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at Princeton including his time in Los Alamos,
including working with Einstein and manages

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to do his army service in
the middle of all this.

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Gets his thesis completed at age 23.

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I mean, an outrageously accelerated time,
extraordinarily rich period of his life.

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>> And Don Morrison said, "What I want
to do is to bring you to Dartmouth

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and give you a completely free hand
to rebuild the math department."

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>> My father's pretty sure that Einstein
and [inaudible] recommended him to Don.

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>> So he arrives on the Dartmouth
campus in 1954.

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>> And so we have the mean
value here among the --

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>> V.H. Brown [phonetic] was on older roley
poley guy, been around Dartmouth a long time.

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He's alleged to have rolled
his eyes like this and said,

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"Things are going to be different around here."

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And lord knows they were.

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[ Music ]

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>> John Ron Doyman [phonetic] was one
of the many Hungarians who immigrated

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to the United States just in
time and contributed immensely

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to the scientific discoveries in this country.

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>> My father attended a lecture
of [inaudible] Los Alamos.

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And it's described in his
book, Man and the Computer.

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And he thinks it's the only place
that lecture was written up.

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And in it, [inaudible] lays out principles
of what a modern computer should be,

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that it be electronic, that
it have an internal program.

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And it could remember instructions
that it could do X,

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Y and Z. And my father distinctly
remembers, "God,

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I hope I live long enough to see such a thing."

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>> Kemeny was back at Princeton recruiting.

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And I was in statistics at Princeton
and not straight mathematics.

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And he was interested in
getting somebody in statistics.

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I thought, well, I don't know, I had no idea
what I was going to do for a life's work.

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But I remember saying to my wife, "Well,
maybe I'll try teaching at Dartmouth."

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>> There was essentially
no computing at Dartmouth.

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There was nothing close by.

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And, Kemeny, in his expensive mode, he wanted
to get into the new things that were going

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on in the world and about that time,
MIT got a machine called the 704

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and he made contact with MIT fairly early.

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They were, I think somewhat anxious
to reach out to other schools.

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>> So my job was to act as a liaison between
Dartmouth and the MIT computer center.

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And it involved taking punch cards, and
everything was punch cards in those days.

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And put them into a steel box and
going down once every two weeks to MIT.

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This involved getting the 6:20
train out at White River Junction.

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And I did that every two weeks.

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Went down to MIT and put the punch cards into
the input hopper into the computer center

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and hung around for 2 or 3 hours until
the printout came out and then took

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that all that junk back up to Dartmouth.

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Well, I figured out that the data transfer
rate, you know, we talk about gigahertz

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and all these kind of stuff,
was 1.67 bits per second.

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That was the data transfer rate.

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>> It was a very slow process.

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>> After a couple of years, John Kemeny decided
maybe it's time to get our own computer.

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So this was about 1958.

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So at that time, the Bradley
Mathematics building was in the works.

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How can we get a computer
into the new Bradley building?

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There's no budget for it.

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But there's budget for furniture
and furnishings.

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A computer is a furniture, right?

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Yeah, okay.

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So that's how they figured
out how to pay for the LGP 30.

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>> The main reason to get the LGP 30 was the
time matter and the fact that it took all day

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to get a program done on MIT on a big
machine, you could do things on the LGP 30,

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which is a quite small machine but
you can get results immediately.

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So the LGP 30 arrived, I don't know when,

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it was some time in 1959 before
the building was completed.

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And so we had to put it somewhere.

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And we put it in the basement of College Hall.

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And John Kemeny got the Science
Foundation to provide money

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to support undergraduate student's
research assistance at Dartmouth

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because we didn't have any graduate students.

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Well, the background of this
is, well 1957, Sputnik went up.

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Okay? Remember Sputnik?

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>> You are hearing the actual signals
transferring by the earth's circling satellite,

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one of the great scientific feats of the age.

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>> And the United States
scientific community went bonkers.

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So the National Science Foundation developed all
kinds of programs to support science instruction

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in the universities, graduate
level and undergraduate level.

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Kemeny was Johnny on the spot, and he would go
to places like the Bronx High School of Science

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and recruit students to come to
Dartmouth if they were good in math.

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I mean, cultures recruit football
players, Kemeny recruited students.

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>> One of the people who was new in
the fall of 1960, was George Cook,

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who was a person Kemeny had
specifically recruited.

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George's job was to prepare a program in
connection with the 1960 presidential election.

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The idea was the LGP 30 would
be used to predict New Hampshire

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on the basis of the initial returns.

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On election night, he was in the
computer center in the basement

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of College Hall and I tagged along to watch.

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So I watched over his shoulder
as he did all these great things

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and produced all of these numbers.

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>> And so I think we were up all night in the
room with the LGP 30 running the state aid

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as it was coming in from the WDIC
reporters and making these predictions.

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>> The headquarters of the major
television networks are equipped

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with entire batteries of tabulating machines.

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And with electronic computers
to forecast the trend

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of the election on the basis of early return.

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>> My memory is that at 9:30 that evening, the
LGP 30 made a prediction of who was going to win

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in New Hampshire and NBC
made the opposite prediction.

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I don't know which way that went but
I do know that the LGP 30 was correct.

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>> I remember Bob [inaudible]
was a physics student.

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But he wrote a very interesting program,

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basically it was a higher
level language interpreter.

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>> Dart was in an attempt, and
it was a successful attempt,

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to put together a language not quite as good
as Fortran, but a simple enough language

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that one could do arithmetic, like
A equals B plus C divided by seven

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or have a square root or something like that.

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And I put together an idea
for that kind of language

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and actually wrote a whole
compiler for the LGP 30.

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And I remember going to a couple of meetings

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for the royal music BLGP users
conference and that sort of thing.

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And they were all sort of surprised that you
could do things like that on the little machine

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that they had used as one step
up from the tabulators in order

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to calculate insurance premiums
and things like that.

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After I got that one done,
Steve Garland came and he said,

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if [inaudible] can do [inaudible],
I can do ALGOR.

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Which was a much more difficult language and
he did indeed make ALGOL run on the LGP 30.

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>> Tom primarily had the
idea that it was important

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to have a higher level language
running on the LGP 30.

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So the question was, not whether they
should be one but which one should it be.

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So this surely was a lot of respect in the
virgin computing for this language ALGOL 60.

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But I think the biggest impact of it was
that it showed Tom and also John Kemeny

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that you could make competition available
to undergraduates in an undergraduate course

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and they could use it to enhance their learning.

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And so that prompted Tom and John to think about
how could we make it more widely available.

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How could we accompany more students?

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[ Music ]

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>> At one point, I could
remember being down at MIT.

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I was still going down to MIT once in a while.

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John McCarthy, famous in artificial
intelligence, had been at Dartmouth and went

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to MIT because they had better computing
facilities at the time that he went.

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And he said, "You guys should do time sharing."

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Okay. Now, what was time sharing?

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So time sharing was the idea, instead
of running one job to completion

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and then putting the next job in, was
a way of running one job for one second

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and then doing something so that the next
job would get it running for one second.

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And then the next job, the
third job, one second.

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In this way, if you had a small job
you could get the results quickly.

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And if you had a big job, you had
to wait, just as in the old days.

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Well, all we had was the LGP 30 at the time.

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We can't do time sharing on the LGP
30, it's just too small a machine

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and the input/output is just too difficult.

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So I came back to Dartmouth and I
talked to John Kemeny and I said,

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John McCarthy thinks we ought
to do time sharing.

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So Kemeny said, okay.

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>> Well, at some point the notion was raised
that Tom and I would go to Phoenix, to well,

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as I understood it, to try to talk
to GE into giving us a free computer.

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I didn't know how the trip to Phoenix was
supposed to result in a computer being handed

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over to Dartmouth, but the airplane
ride was long and I had a lot

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of chance to talk to Tom [inaudible].

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I think as I reconstruct matters, it must be
that on the airplane I jotted down something

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in the way of a blocked diagram,
how this might work.

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>> GE couldn't of cared less
of how we were going to do it.

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We were treated as customers.

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So that was kind of an experiment
that led nowhere.

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We decided to do the right thing and
invite other companies to submit proposals.

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And the companies were IBM,
General Electric, of course,

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National Cash, Bendix and Burroughs, I believe.

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So it turned out that the GE proposal was much
more in line with what we were planning to do.

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Not only was it the best
equipment for our purposes in terms

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of what our product could do
architecturally, but it was also the cheapest.

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So it was a non-issue.

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And we put in a letter of intent to GE in the
summer of 1963 sometime other in the fall.

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At that time the NSF was funding
purchase of computers by universities.

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So we put the proposal in and for
the computer purchase proposal,

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we were going to develop a time sharing system
using the undergraduate students as programmers.

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And the peer review was, you can't have
undergraduate students writing software

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for a major in computing system.

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Fortunately, Kemeny had such good relations
with the people at the Science Foundation

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that in spite of these slightly
negative reviews, they funded us.

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The whole project was governed by the
idea of introducing computing to everybody

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on the Dartmouth campus or nearly everybody.

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To that end, what we had to do
was to make a computer system

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that goes easy to use for everybody.

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Easy to use.

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And of course that meant time sharing.

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We also had to invent a computer programming
language that was also easy to learn and easy

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to use, and that of course, was BASIC.

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>> I expected, and I think others expected

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that the ALGOR 30 would become
the language used at Dartmouth.

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But this turned out not to be the case.

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Kennedy didn't like ALGOR.

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>> And I know I looked at two of the
languages that were around at the time.

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And with the idea of making
simplified subsets of those languages,

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it could be used for our
project and I couldn't do it,

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because if you made them simpler,
it was a different language.

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>> So at early stage there, Kemeny
was thinking in a different direction.

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>> I quickly came to the
decision that Kemeny was right.

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We needed a new language.

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>> So I was coming out of it from an standpoint

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of somebody intensely interested
in a new graduate education.

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And his skill was simplifying things so that
he could be understood by ordinary people.

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And this is from a different context, but I
remember talking [inaudible] later on when I was

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on the faculty at Dartmouth, the topic of alumni
college was, where have all the heroes gone?

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John gave a one hour lecture
on his hero, Albert Einstein.

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>> I put an outline of my lecture on the
blackboard for you in case you're taking notes.

218
00:17:12,846 --> 00:17:14,816
Those are the five parts of my lecture.

219
00:17:16,296 --> 00:17:20,406
>> And the lecture started out with him
reminiscing about what it was like when he was

220
00:17:20,406 --> 00:17:24,626
in the graduate school in Princeton,
and what Einstein was like as a person

221
00:17:24,796 --> 00:17:27,206
and what it was like to work for Einstein.

222
00:17:29,326 --> 00:17:32,476
Leaving in things about his days
at Los Alamos and stuff like that.

223
00:17:32,476 --> 00:17:36,396
And then he started to say, well, Einstein, of
course, was noted for the theory of relativity.

224
00:17:36,636 --> 00:17:39,206
Of course everybody knows the
equation equals MC squared.

225
00:17:39,206 --> 00:17:43,235
And this was getting through about
halfway through the hour of the lecture.

226
00:17:43,236 --> 00:17:47,506
And then he started doing a little bit more,
we'll just look at this little book carefully.

227
00:17:47,626 --> 00:17:49,296
Where does he come up with
an idea like this from?

228
00:17:50,406 --> 00:17:54,76
You know, about 40 minutes into the hour
lecture, I get this sinking feeling in the pit

229
00:17:54,76 --> 00:17:58,426
of my stomach that John is about to try
to prove E equals MC squared to a group

230
00:17:58,426 --> 00:18:00,856
of Dartmouth alumni who know no mathematics.

231
00:18:01,506 --> 00:18:05,586
And lo and behold he pulls it off [chuckles].

232
00:18:07,96 --> 00:18:11,496
He somehow isolated out the
essential parts of it and put it

233
00:18:11,496 --> 00:18:13,476
in a language that people could understand.

234
00:18:13,956 --> 00:18:17,156
You came out of there thinking that
you could have proved it yourself.

235
00:18:17,196 --> 00:18:23,505
>> That of course, is Einstein's
best known result [applause].

236
00:18:23,506 --> 00:18:32,396
>> John was convinced that things could be made
simple and that's the real origin of BASIC.

237
00:18:33,96 --> 00:18:35,956
>> So we're getting involved in
this project and he probably thought

238
00:18:35,956 --> 00:18:38,836
to himself, I bet I can write a compiler.

239
00:18:39,666 --> 00:18:45,346
You know, a compiler is a big
program, 3,000 lines of code.

240
00:18:46,46 --> 00:18:47,346
I bet I can write a compiler.

241
00:18:48,216 --> 00:18:49,186
And he could.

242
00:18:49,876 --> 00:18:50,656
And so he did.

243
00:18:51,676 --> 00:18:58,995
And he started that in, I think the
summer of 1963 and he hired a young man

244
00:18:58,996 --> 00:19:04,866
from the Tuck school, a young Tuck student
named Bill Zani, to do some test run on it.

245
00:19:05,16 --> 00:19:12,786
>> He'd wake up at 3 or 4 am and
work two hours doing the programming.

246
00:19:12,786 --> 00:19:21,156
And he would come in with the code and I'd
meet him at 8:30, 9 o'clock in the morning.

247
00:19:21,156 --> 00:19:23,646
He would go over it with me.

248
00:19:23,786 --> 00:19:25,936
And it would be handwritten.

249
00:19:26,326 --> 00:19:34,606
I would then have to put into
punch cards of that code to be read

250
00:19:34,676 --> 00:19:38,406
into the GE computer and [inaudible].

251
00:19:39,26 --> 00:19:41,906
>> And if any computer scientist was
to take a look at that the compiler,

252
00:19:42,56 --> 00:19:46,376
it was hard to understand, hard to maintain,

253
00:19:46,466 --> 00:19:50,356
only would John's brilliance
could have controlled the beast

254
00:19:50,616 --> 00:19:53,76
of that complexity and made it work.

255
00:19:53,596 --> 00:19:59,116
>> During that summer we got a lot of it working
but there were still a lot of problems with it.

256
00:20:00,46 --> 00:20:08,36
But the first time that I thought it was
working successfully was when we could enter

257
00:20:08,96 --> 00:20:15,66
in a halfway decent sized program
and get the results we anticipated.

258
00:20:15,206 --> 00:20:21,936
And I can tell you for sure, I was
the first man to see BASIC run.

259
00:20:22,496 --> 00:20:24,976
My claim to fame.

260
00:20:25,516 --> 00:20:30,756
[ Music ]

261
00:20:31,256 --> 00:20:33,246
>> I had a scholarship.

262
00:20:33,906 --> 00:20:40,196
But as part of the scholarship was a
scholarship where you had to do something useful

263
00:20:40,196 --> 00:20:43,616
to the college during the academic year.

264
00:20:43,616 --> 00:20:48,186
It's my freshmen year and I ended up
working at the library, the math library,

265
00:20:48,386 --> 00:20:50,896
which meant sitting behind
a desk and doing nothing.

266
00:20:51,606 --> 00:20:53,916
So it wasn't bad, but it
wasn't very interesting.

267
00:20:54,276 --> 00:20:58,266
And so the next year, again, I can't remember
what the list was of things that I could choose,

268
00:20:58,486 --> 00:21:01,116
but one of them was, well, you
can work on this computer project

269
00:21:01,876 --> 00:21:03,485
which caused me to ask, what's a computer?

270
00:21:03,726 --> 00:21:04,806
>> There was a meeting.

271
00:21:04,986 --> 00:21:07,726
Mike Busch was there, John
McGeachie, I was there.

272
00:21:07,726 --> 00:21:12,546
And Tom handed out manuals for the DATANET 30.

273
00:21:12,756 --> 00:21:20,946
So we each had to write some actual code
as part of the exam to see how well we did.

274
00:21:21,26 --> 00:21:23,386
Mike had some sort of programming experience.

275
00:21:23,386 --> 00:21:31,646
And so he wrote by far the best DATANET 30
executive program for scanning the serial lines

276
00:21:31,646 --> 00:21:34,636
and ever after he was the DATANET 30 programmer.

277
00:21:35,56 --> 00:21:40,496
>> And so we were learning how to write or
build what became called an operating system.

278
00:21:40,496 --> 00:21:42,246
They didn't have one.

279
00:21:42,336 --> 00:21:44,286
I don't think anybody had one at that point,

280
00:21:44,286 --> 00:21:49,156
so that was what building the
Dartmouth Time-Sharing System meant.

281
00:21:49,456 --> 00:21:54,106
>> Some of my earliest memories of the
project was, Tom Kurtz had a couple of memos.

282
00:21:54,206 --> 00:21:57,525
Memo number 0 was a memo on memos.

283
00:21:57,526 --> 00:22:05,766
And then memo number one was procedures for the
time sharing system, in which he laid out a lot

284
00:22:05,766 --> 00:22:11,16
of the principles including, wherever
there was a choice between simplicity

285
00:22:11,16 --> 00:22:16,106
and another approach, take the simple approach.

286
00:22:16,426 --> 00:22:24,96
>> The computer arrived, I think it was
in February of 1964, and the two students

287
00:22:24,96 --> 00:22:28,466
who were writing the operating systems for
the computer, Mike Busch and John McGeachie,

288
00:22:28,796 --> 00:22:30,176
had a real computer to work with.

289
00:22:31,386 --> 00:22:38,216
>> Working on the code long before the
computer arrives is actually quite hard to do

290
00:22:38,346 --> 00:22:41,456
because you don't really
know if it's going to work.

291
00:22:41,456 --> 00:22:44,666
>> It helps to have some other people around
that might be experts, but we didn't have much

292
00:22:44,666 --> 00:22:46,35
in the way of experts at that time.

293
00:22:46,36 --> 00:22:50,626
>> So there was a lot of hand coding
and hand analysis that went on.

294
00:22:50,736 --> 00:22:53,616
When the computers came, then it became real.

295
00:22:53,616 --> 00:22:57,985
>> It took the GE engineers maybe a
month to get it all up and running.

296
00:22:57,986 --> 00:23:03,856
And then we were on it in the sense
that the undergraduates who were part

297
00:23:03,886 --> 00:23:10,436
of the student assistantship program,
basically had priority of access to the machine.

298
00:23:10,436 --> 00:23:14,206
And it was, for all intents and
purposes, it was our machine,

299
00:23:14,206 --> 00:23:16,606
which was we shared with John Kemeny.

300
00:23:16,716 --> 00:23:22,166
>> I remember in the basement of College
Hall, handing professor Kemeny a card

301
00:23:22,166 --> 00:23:30,426
that my BASIC program, he running it through the
card reader at the council hall of the GE 225

302
00:23:30,666 --> 00:23:34,876
and then together we would go
over to look at the printer,

303
00:23:34,876 --> 00:23:38,346
he hoping that his BASIC
compiler did the right thing.

304
00:23:38,546 --> 00:23:43,346
Me hoping that my BASIC program did the
right, you know, the right calculation.

305
00:23:43,346 --> 00:23:46,736
And it was a glorious experience.

306
00:23:47,196 --> 00:23:51,656
>> The whole time sharing system revolved
around the DATANET 30 and the GE 225.

307
00:23:52,16 --> 00:23:55,556
Sort of talking to each other
on a very frequent basis.

308
00:23:56,446 --> 00:24:00,116
>> They weren't really built
to do what we had in mind.

309
00:24:00,116 --> 00:24:01,926
There was nothing built to
do what we had in mind.

310
00:24:02,336 --> 00:24:07,356
>> I spent an extraordinary amount of hours
at College Hall trying to make things work.

311
00:24:07,716 --> 00:24:13,176
>> At the time we didn't know that
this was supposed to be impossible.

312
00:24:13,176 --> 00:24:19,646
We didn't know how, or I didn't know
how revolutionary it was going to be.

313
00:24:19,646 --> 00:24:27,426
Kemeny and Kurtz clearly had
some vision but I as a freshmen

314
00:24:27,426 --> 00:24:29,956
and sophomore was just, you know, this is fun.

315
00:24:32,686 --> 00:24:37,166
>> May 1st, of course, is a
signal day in all of this.

316
00:24:37,946 --> 00:24:44,926
John McGeachie and Mike Busch were working
on the operating system for the GE hardware

317
00:24:45,26 --> 00:24:50,826
which involved the operating system for
two separate computers and a storage device

318
00:24:50,826 --> 00:24:53,36
which was accessed by both of them.

319
00:24:53,36 --> 00:24:56,476
It was quite a complicated
thing that it had to do.

320
00:24:56,476 --> 00:25:03,496
And the BASIC compiler had already been written
by John Kemeny and that was part of this mix.

321
00:25:03,676 --> 00:25:07,295
But John McGeachie and Mike Busch
didn't have to work with that.

322
00:25:07,296 --> 00:25:08,356
They just had to use it.

323
00:25:08,836 --> 00:25:13,826
So on May 1st, overnight,
they were working all night.

324
00:25:13,876 --> 00:25:19,186
And we say 4 am in the morning, we don't know
really where it was, that's a wild guess.

325
00:25:20,6 --> 00:25:26,386
What happened was they got the operating
system to work, running a simple BASIC program

326
00:25:26,386 --> 00:25:29,556
on separate teletype machines at the same time.

327
00:25:29,556 --> 00:25:35,806
So we call it the birth of BASIC but it would
be just as legitimate to say it's the birth

328
00:25:35,806 --> 00:25:38,166
of DTSS, the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System.

329
00:25:38,166 --> 00:25:46,576
>> What really happened on May
1st was a clear proof of concept.

330
00:25:46,576 --> 00:25:54,286
A clear demonstration that all the work that
had gone into the thinking about whether

331
00:25:54,286 --> 00:25:57,996
or not what could actually share
a machine amongst several people,

332
00:25:57,996 --> 00:26:03,36
the thinking about whether this
simple language would work.

333
00:26:03,36 --> 00:26:06,206
All of that was proved correct.

334
00:26:06,206 --> 00:26:10,265
And then from then on it was
merely a matter of improving it,

335
00:26:10,266 --> 00:26:13,886
expanding it and making it reliable.

336
00:26:14,516 --> 00:26:24,316
[ Music ]

337
00:26:24,816 --> 00:26:34,56
>> In Fall of '64, we were invited
to make a presentation at AFIPS.

338
00:26:34,56 --> 00:26:39,706
It was a big deal of computer
people in San Francisco.

339
00:26:39,706 --> 00:26:44,305
There was a room of maybe
2,000 people in the room.

340
00:26:45,206 --> 00:26:55,856
We hooked up the acoustic coupler on with the
handset and we linked up the Model 33 teletype

341
00:26:56,496 --> 00:26:58,486
to Hanover, we'd have the dial tone.

342
00:26:59,246 --> 00:27:03,946
And all of this was videotaped
on a screen for the audience.

343
00:27:05,46 --> 00:27:11,896
And we were entering programs
in it and lo and behold

344
00:27:12,116 --> 00:27:16,246
up comes the answers and shown on the screen.

345
00:27:17,76 --> 00:27:28,756
And everybody went bananas on this simple BASIC
language being compiled and run in San Francisco

346
00:27:29,166 --> 00:27:33,716
over ordinary telephone lines in the
computer and college halls in Hanover.

347
00:27:34,866 --> 00:27:41,66
And we were bombarded with
questions of what it was.

348
00:27:41,426 --> 00:27:45,505
And that's the first time I
really got to see the impact

349
00:27:45,996 --> 00:27:48,876
of what the Dartmouth time sharing had.

350
00:27:50,256 --> 00:27:59,766
>> We had taken a fairly expensive computer that
could only be used by one person at that time

351
00:28:00,486 --> 00:28:06,516
and converted it into something where
wasn't just 30 users who could use it,

352
00:28:06,516 --> 00:28:11,696
it was 30 undergraduate students
using this computer simultaneously,

353
00:28:12,166 --> 00:28:15,346
writing programs, getting answers quickly.

354
00:28:15,346 --> 00:28:21,676
It was a combination of immediacy and
simplicity that had not previously existed.

355
00:28:21,996 --> 00:28:25,336
>> I know Kemeny was pushing
everybody to, you know,

356
00:28:25,336 --> 00:28:29,296
in their beginning math classes
to do something with a computer.

357
00:28:29,896 --> 00:28:31,456
>> Will be the solution for
[inaudible] equation.

358
00:28:31,456 --> 00:28:37,305
This is particularly interesting because

359
00:28:37,366 --> 00:28:43,806
>> If this had been built on a language like
ALGOR or Fortran instead of teaching students

360
00:28:43,806 --> 00:28:50,606
in 2 or 3 hours how to use BASIC, what
would have spent easily a full week trying

361
00:28:50,606 --> 00:28:54,636
to have them understand ALGOR unfortunately,
and a lot of students just lost interest.

362
00:28:55,216 --> 00:28:59,376
>> Writing this program in
BASIC is your next assignment.

363
00:29:01,826 --> 00:29:04,306
>> So this was the first
[inaudible] large scale effort

364
00:29:04,306 --> 00:29:06,706
and undergraduate [inaudible] for computing.

365
00:29:06,906 --> 00:29:09,906
>> Today, approximately 85 percent

366
00:29:09,906 --> 00:29:12,616
of all Dartmouth undergraduates
make use of the computer.

367
00:29:13,136 --> 00:29:17,616
Students in more than 100 courses,
ranging from the sciences and mathematics

368
00:29:17,936 --> 00:29:20,456
to economics and education and in psychology.

369
00:29:20,606 --> 00:29:26,366
To languages and sociology, make direct use of
the system in completing course assignments.

370
00:29:26,896 --> 00:29:31,796
>> So we had many different faculty members in
many departments who were doing more and more.

371
00:29:33,466 --> 00:29:48,995
>> This structured weight is also
using the computer in the study

372
00:29:48,996 --> 00:29:52,636
of Latin, poetry and prose style.

373
00:29:52,636 --> 00:29:57,745
As well as preparing elementary
exercises in beginning Latin.

374
00:29:57,746 --> 00:30:04,706
>> I would say that it was certainly a
revolution for people that were involved in it

375
00:30:05,296 --> 00:30:11,646
because people could actually get things done.

376
00:30:11,646 --> 00:30:18,735
People would come up with their own idea, hey
I have a computer and I have a right to use

377
00:30:18,796 --> 00:30:24,436
that computer, and I can
use it for anything I want.

378
00:30:24,436 --> 00:30:26,346
And they would.

379
00:30:26,426 --> 00:30:34,366
>> Very quickly after the Dartmouth
Time-Sharing System became available,

380
00:30:34,366 --> 00:30:35,456
people were making games.

381
00:30:35,506 --> 00:30:37,366
[Chuckles] it was a leading sign
of what was going to happen.

382
00:30:37,366 --> 00:30:41,496
>> Then we wrote a program that emulated
football that would run on the computer.

383
00:30:41,496 --> 00:30:46,676
Which was very popular with the students
because you could sit there and call the plays.

384
00:30:47,96 --> 00:30:49,16
You could pick simple runs.

385
00:30:49,16 --> 00:30:49,726
Tricky runs.

386
00:30:49,726 --> 00:30:50,716
Short pass, long pass.

387
00:30:50,716 --> 00:30:53,325
>> Somewhere during the game, there would
be a dog on the field who'd come up.

388
00:30:53,416 --> 00:30:55,566
You know, that game would have to be delayed.

389
00:30:55,566 --> 00:31:00,546
Had nothing to do with the
game, but that always happened

390
00:31:00,546 --> 00:31:06,56
at a real football game so we put it in there.

391
00:31:06,346 --> 00:31:11,786
>> Turned out that often a lot of the terminal
side are getting more use because lots

392
00:31:11,786 --> 00:31:14,66
of students hear, this is a great football game.

393
00:31:14,66 --> 00:31:15,916
>> Qubic was another one.

394
00:31:16,406 --> 00:31:21,466
You have a three dimensional tic tac
toe on a four by four by four board,

395
00:31:22,706 --> 00:31:27,456
people will keep writing programs for that.

396
00:31:27,456 --> 00:31:32,515
>> We didn't care what the students did with it.

397
00:31:32,646 --> 00:31:39,136
And they did a lot of interesting
things, I'm sure, that we never heard of.

398
00:31:39,136 --> 00:31:49,586
>> In the Fall of 1964, Kemeny I think was
on the school board of Hanover High School.

399
00:31:49,886 --> 00:31:52,896
[Inaudible] high school to have a teletype.

400
00:31:52,896 --> 00:32:00,296
>> We learned pretty quickly that high school
students were just as eager and just as good

401
00:32:00,396 --> 00:32:03,346
as undergraduates at writing programs.

402
00:32:03,996 --> 00:32:06,536
>> We grow up, I think, as
the first computer kids,

403
00:32:06,536 --> 00:32:10,286
kids who had computers accessible on demand.

404
00:32:10,286 --> 00:32:16,136
>> Then before you knew it, it was you needed
to know something about computing, ask your kid.

405
00:32:16,136 --> 00:32:18,466
>> Pretty soon we had hundreds of users.

406
00:32:18,466 --> 00:32:20,896
>> There was a big phone
company follow them and they had

407
00:32:21,16 --> 00:32:23,236
to add new trunk lines into the town of Hanover.

408
00:32:23,406 --> 00:32:24,775
>> Oh they just bought New England.

409
00:32:24,776 --> 00:32:34,76
Bought times on Dartmouth Time-Sharing System
235 system that was running in the basement

410
00:32:34,76 --> 00:32:39,446
of College Hall or later in the computer center.

411
00:32:39,716 --> 00:32:49,275
>> The interesting thing about the architecture
of it, it was designed to hold a big computer.

412
00:32:49,276 --> 00:32:54,616
So there was a big central computer room
with glass doors at the front and the back

413
00:32:54,616 --> 00:33:02,156
so everybody would come in and see this
wonderful computer machine sitting there.

414
00:33:02,156 --> 00:33:09,96
>> I can remember tourists coming through
key web, there'll be admission tours pointing

415
00:33:09,96 --> 00:33:16,516
out that this is the largest computer in
the world, you could see through the glass.

416
00:33:16,516 --> 00:33:22,276
I also heard that key was third on
the congresswomen /HREUPB's list right

417
00:33:22,276 --> 00:33:32,416
after the Pentagon and sack oh /PHA had
a. That the big tree outside key web

418
00:33:32,466 --> 00:33:38,156
and the round planting tipped up,
that was the missile sigh low.

419
00:33:38,386 --> 00:33:45,896
>> I once estimated that even before
ill Gates got into the action at all,

420
00:33:46,116 --> 00:33:49,676
5 million people in the world knew
how to write programs in BASIC.

421
00:33:49,676 --> 00:33:55,706
There were something like 80 time
sharing systems in the United States

422
00:33:55,706 --> 00:33:59,686
that offered BASIC as one of their languages.

423
00:33:59,686 --> 00:34:03,366
And it was all over the world.

424
00:34:03,366 --> 00:34:06,706
I even got a letter from somebody in Syberia.

425
00:34:06,796 --> 00:34:11,775
A student in Syberia wrote me a letter once.

426
00:34:11,996 --> 00:34:13,686
This is before Gates, BG.

427
00:34:13,926 --> 00:34:24,746
>> No, I was here when key wit was built
and I was there when I tore it down.

428
00:34:24,746 --> 00:34:26,996
So, I was kind of sort of realized

429
00:34:26,996 --> 00:34:30,966
that I had not only outlived an
operating system, I outlived a building.

430
00:34:31,275 --> 00:34:35,255
>> Over the 20 years, I'm
quite sure that the coming

431
00:34:35,255 --> 00:34:42,625
of the computer will have a significant effect
on all businesses and most private lives.

432
00:34:42,806 --> 00:34:48,525
Whether these affects will be fully favorable
as they could be or [inaudible] will depend

433
00:34:48,576 --> 00:34:50,536
on whether those who make
policy decisions are aware

434
00:34:50,536 --> 00:34:54,386
of what computers can do
and what they cannot do.

435
00:34:54,386 --> 00:34:56,286
>> There's a couple of things
that make the story

436
00:34:56,286 --> 00:35:00,386
of Dartmouth time-sharing BASIC interesting.

437
00:35:00,646 --> 00:35:06,786
First of all, it was the first effort in the
history of computing to try to bring computing

438
00:35:06,786 --> 00:35:10,456
and make it simpler and bring it to the
masses, so that the masses could use it.

439
00:35:10,456 --> 00:35:11,276
>> Kemeny was amazing.

440
00:35:11,276 --> 00:35:11,625
A visionary.

441
00:35:11,866 --> 00:35:13,936
He had a view where we all
ought to be computer literate.

442
00:35:13,966 --> 00:35:15,496
Before most of us even realized
that computers existed.

443
00:35:15,526 --> 00:35:16,816
>> The second thing that was
interesting about it was,

444
00:35:16,846 --> 00:35:17,986
it was all done by undergraduate students.

445
00:35:18,16 --> 00:35:20,206
Nowhere else do I know of in the history of
computing, has something like this been done.

446
00:35:20,236 --> 00:35:21,316
>> As I grew up and worked in organizations,

447
00:35:21,346 --> 00:35:23,566
I realized that this was the most incredible
example of what's called an aligned team.

448
00:35:23,596 --> 00:35:25,666
>> I've had a few super teams in my career,
but looking back on it, that Dartmouth team,

449
00:35:25,696 --> 00:35:26,926
is probably the most incredible experience,

450
00:35:26,956 --> 00:35:28,486
particularly considering it
was entirely undergraduates.

451
00:35:28,516 --> 00:35:29,566
>> The third thing is, it was done at Dartmouth.

452
00:35:29,596 --> 00:35:31,516
>> I hope the thousands of students I
have taught and the contribution I made

453
00:35:31,546 --> 00:35:33,76
to their education has to be
my number one contribution.

454
00:35:33,106 --> 00:35:34,906
Secondly, things I did to bring
Dartmouth to forefront of computing,

455
00:35:34,936 --> 00:35:36,976
which I hope is a contribution both to
Dartmouth and indirectly to the nation.

456
00:35:37,516 --> 00:35:47,736
[ Background Noise ]

457
00:35:48,236 --> 00:35:59,846
>> Kemeny was very helpful to me in my last
year at Dartmouth, I took a course from him.

458
00:35:59,846 --> 00:36:05,536
The night before the final exam, I
found out by telephone from my mother

459
00:36:05,586 --> 00:36:07,875
that my father had died that day.

460
00:36:08,426 --> 00:36:17,875
Kemeny spoke to me and said that I should
skip the final exam and take it in the summer.

461
00:36:19,416 --> 00:36:21,486
And that all worked out all right.

462
00:36:21,726 --> 00:36:26,66
But then there was a question of the money.

463
00:36:26,536 --> 00:36:34,886
So, my father having died, there was no
money neither for tuition nor for room.

464
00:36:34,996 --> 00:36:42,76
Well, Kemeny wrote letters to the
appropriate officials at Dartmouth

465
00:36:42,586 --> 00:36:48,846
and I was given a scholarship for a
thousand dollars and an offer of a loan.

466
00:36:49,46 --> 00:36:54,296
In addition, somehow magically
I got an offer from Bob

467
00:36:54,296 --> 00:36:58,466
and Anita Norman of free rent in their basement.

468
00:36:59,386 --> 00:37:08,936
Meanwhile, in 1962, Tom had
hired a secretary for the summer

469
00:37:08,936 --> 00:37:15,96
and that secretary ended up as my wife, Susan.

470
00:37:15,536 --> 00:37:22,426
Kemeny found out that Susan did not complete the
requirements for graduation from the University

471
00:37:22,426 --> 00:37:28,716
of Maryland and he arranged for her
to be accepted by the summer school.

472
00:37:28,866 --> 00:37:32,136
As you may know, summer schools
like to make money.

473
00:37:32,136 --> 00:37:37,466
They don't give away free anything.

474
00:37:38,216 --> 00:37:42,836
I think Kemeny paid the tuition himself.

475
00:37:43,516 --> 00:38:12,70
[ Music ]