🚀 go-pugleaf

On May 8, 3:48 am, ppnerkDELETET...@yahoo.com (Phred) wrote:
> In article <5d3988b0-f0ee-475e-9e30-5071a087d...@v26g2000prm.googlegroups.com>, "R.Nicholson" <rhnlo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >The article says that at 4 a.m. on May 1st, 1964, Kemeny and Kurtz ran
> >their first BASIC program on Dartmouth college's General Electric
> >GE-225 mainframe.
>
> Interesting, before I read this I would have been happy to say the
> language I was briefly introduced to on a GE-225 at UQ was BASIC.
>
> But that was in 1963!  So, does anyone out there recall what *was* the
> actual "user language" on that beast in those days?  Attempting to
> dredge the dark recesses of 45-year-old memory I find flutterings of
> an answer... but nothing definite.
>
> Clearly, I didn't get sufficiently involved then to actually write a
> program. :)  AFAICR the early lectures all involved matrix algebra
> (which I'd never studied as such) and went so far over my head that I
> decided I had better things to do with my time.
>
> I guess they were leading into a discussion of data arrays and such,
> but they way they presented it was incomprehensible to me.  Buggered
> if I know why they felt the need to do it that way -- arrays as such
> are perfectly simple concepts.  Perhaps lecturers don't get paid if
> they make things too easy. ;-)
>
> >(Thankfully, they continued program language development beyond
> >their Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment , or this
> >group [c.l.b.m] might have had the much less desirable name: comp.lang.DOPE  :)
>

Just a guess, Phred, but it might have been FORTRAN II which is
superficially quite similar to BASIC. FORTRAN II was certainly around
in 1963. When I first learnt FORTRAN IV (in the 1970s) the examples
were still all very "matrixy", perhaps because it was taught to me as
part of a numeric analysis course. One of the things that I liked
about BASIC was that it could do everything that FORTRAN could do plus
it could handle text. Although you could handle text in FORTRAN IV it
wasn't easy. By comparison text-handling was a doddle with BASIC. In
fact at the time the only generally available language which was
better than BASIC was SNOBOL4.

Cheers

Derek