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50th Anniversary of BASIC

posted by n1 on Thursday May 01 2014, @05:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the 50-print-happy-birthday-55-goto-50 dept.

A reader called gewg_ writes:

from dartmouth.edu

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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  • (Score: 1) by quacking duck on Thursday May 01 2014, @01:56PM

    by quacking duck (1395) on Thursday May 01 2014, @01:56PM (#38481)

    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.

    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

    by Covalent (43) on Thursday May 01 2014, @04:00PM (#38538) Journal

    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

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday May 01 2014, @04:23PM (#38544)

      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.