BASIC: The Language That Opened Computing

You are near Dartmouth College, where in nineteen sixty-four two mathematics professors quietly changed the history of computing.

John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz had a problem: computers were powerful but completely inaccessible to anyone who was not a trained specialist. To fix this, they created a new programming language simple enough for students with no technical background to learn in a single afternoon. They called it Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, which became known to the world simply as BASIC. It ran on Dartmouth's time-sharing system, meaning dozens of students could use the college mainframe at once, something nearly unheard of at the time. BASIC spread rapidly to universities, then to the first personal computers of the nineteen seventies. It was the language a young Bill Gates used to write software for the Altair eight hundred, and it was the first language millions of people ever wrote. The marker here, dedicated in twenty nineteen, recognizes what was set in motion on this campus more than half a century ago.