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At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall, Professor John Kemeny and a student programmer simultaneously typed RUN on neighboring terminals. When they both got back correct answers to their simple programs, time-sharing and BASIC were born. Those innovations made computing accessible to all Dartmouth students and faculty, and soon after, to people across the nation and the world.
Dartmouth's BASIC at 50 anniversary celebration was held yesterday, which included the public premier of a documentary on the history and impact of BASIC.
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I'm mentally OVERDRAWN! What's that SIGNPOST up ahead? Where's ROD
STERLING when you really need him?
(Score: 2) by Covalent on Thursday May 01 2014, @12:21PM
To my mind, computer programming should be taught EARLY (Kindergarten), not to produce a world of programmers, but to produce a world of people who can think procedurally.
But even basic computer skills programs are being dropped from education today. My students as a rule can barely type. They can text like you wouldn't believe, but ask them to type a 2-page paper, and they'd be better off writing it by hand. Hunt and peck in this generation is appalling but widespread.
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Thursday May 01 2014, @12:54PM
Not gonna happen, there's too many people who are incapable of doing this. I once worked w/ a guy who had a degree in mathematics. He was a terrible programmer, couldn't make his way past an array.
Logic is not something everyone "gets." To most it's boring, like History and English classes were to me.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday May 01 2014, @02:24PM
Logic is not something everyone "gets." To most it's boring, like History and English classes were to me.
There's no such thing as a boring class, only a boring teacher. I was bored with history in public school, but both of my college history classes were fascinating.
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(Score: 1) by NigelO on Thursday May 01 2014, @05:26PM
Maybe it was you that changed between public school and college, and that's why it became interesting to you?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday May 01 2014, @06:22PM
Exactly. A private school might have had interesting teachers.
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(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday May 01 2014, @06:58PM
There is no such thing as a boring teacher, only bored students, who usually are boring people, and who since they are boring and so bored, think the teacher is boring, and if the student if boring enough, they can even make the subject matter boring. Whether a school is public or private makes no difference in this, except that higher tuition tends to weed out some of the more boring students.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday May 01 2014, @11:03PM
Spoken as if by a boring teacher. Public school teachers often aren't teaching from their own fields. Your math teacher could have been a journalism major, the science teacher an art major. They're not excited by what they're teaching, so of course their students won't be.
It is the teachers JOB to not bore the students, but to interest them, stir their curiosity. The students have no such mandate. Your comment sounds like a boring teacher's attempt at an excuse for being a bore.
Bored people aren't boring, boring people cause people to be bored.
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(Score: 1) by quacking duck on Thursday May 01 2014, @01:56PM
Which is a bit sad. The most life-changing high school class for me wasn't computer science, or math, or any of the stepping stones to the engineering degree I ended up getting. They were important, sure, but the most crucial life skill was the grade 9 keyboarding class that took me from hunt-and-peck to over 100 wpm for a time.
That aside, I've been saying that the next successful computer keyboard won't be a full-size qwerty, but a phone-sized one, specifically for texting-savvy thumb-typers.
(Score: 2) by Covalent on Thursday May 01 2014, @04:00PM
I agree. The ability to type quickly has been invaluable to me. Honestly, though, I don't see a phone-sized input device ever being fast enough to replace a full-sized keyboard. Hands aren't getting any smaller - keyboards need to be "hand sized" to make full use of our fingers. A switch to Dvorak would probably help, too.
I'm not even sure voice recognition can fully replace typing. I've found that when I do speech to text, I say lots of ums and uhs and ers and then I want to go back and change things. Then I reach for the keyboard.
Perhaps future generations will finally have good enough voice recognition to make using it more efficient than typing, but somehow I doubt that will happen for quite some time.
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Thursday May 01 2014, @04:23PM
Dvorak isn't going to make you significantly faster. It will make you happier, however, as you'll experience less RSI and strain since you don't have to contort your fingers as much with it.
Another alternative to explore is COLEMAK; it has most of the benefits of Dvorak but is easier to learn for QWERTY typists since it only moves a handful of keys, unlike Dvorak which moves almost all of them.