Synopsis
The story of BASIC--the Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code--has become the stuff of legend, a grand technology creation myth originating not in Silicon Valley but at modest Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in the early 1960s. The brainchild of two Dartmouth mathematics professors, BASIC was taught to millions of students in the second half of the twentieth century--and, in the process, eventually satisfied a democratic vision of computing for all.
Mark Jones Lorenzo chronicled the history of BASIC in the wide-ranging book Endless Loop, tracing the language’s rise, fall, and central role in the history of computing. Now, in GOSUB Without RETURN, he narrows the scope and sharpens the focus, taking you between the lines of BASIC in order to answer these ten critical questions:
Why did BASIC arise at Dartmouth but not elsewhere?
What led to the design decisions for BASIC and the DTSS (Dartmouth Time-Sharing System)?
Did computing pioneer Sister Mary Kenneth Keller help create Dartmouth BASIC?
Why did the formal standardization of BASIC fail?
Did Microsoft develop TI BASIC for the Texas Instruments 99/4 home computer?
How did the emergence of “computer literacy” spell the end of BASIC?
Why did BASIC explode in popularity in the United Kingdom in the 1980s?
What can we learn from the 1980s Usborne BASIC books?
How does GW-BASIC generate pseudorandom numbers?
Can a BASIC interpreter be written using a BASIC interpreter?
En route to discovering the elusive answers to all ten questions, you will explore how BASIC influenced a generation of videogame designers around the world; learn about the poetry and prose of BASIC; uncover why BASIC code was transmitted over the airwaves; investigate programming languages like COMAL, FOCAL, Logo, Pascal, and Python, in addition to VPLs and microcontrollers, that tried to replace BASIC in the educational arena; examine how BASIC impacted pop culture; recount the programming pranks that Dartmouth undergraduates played on unsuspecting time-sharing users; review BASIC contests from the past and present; consider what might best earn the title of a “modern BASIC”; and much, much more.
A journey into the heart of BASIC certain to trigger discussion and debate, GOSUB Without RETURN is a deep dive into a classic programming language--and a treasure trove of all things BASIC.