I n the 1960s, most people who wanted to use computers submitted programs on punch cards to a central facility. An operator fed a batch of cards into a mainframe; users then had to wait 24 hours for a result. In 1963, Dartmouth College mathematicians John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz were planning a new campus computer system. Guessing that the prospect of long waits would keep students at bay, the duo devised a time-sharing system to give many students simultaneous access-and the first user-friendly programming language to go along with it. They called their new language BASIC, for Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

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