It appears that rbowman <bowman@montana.com> said:

I wonder if Kemeny and Kurtz realized what they were spawning?

I heard Kemeny talk one time and I think they did. The goal was to provide
a computer utility that their non-technical students could use.

Dartmouth BASIC was quite different from the bastardized versions that became popular on PCs. One major difference was that it was a true compiler. When you typed RUN it ran the compiler which translated your program into machine code and then ran it. The compiler was so fast that it wasn't worth saving the object
code, just compile it each time.

Some years later in the 1970s a friend of mine finally wrote a linker for DTSS when they added PL/I which was too big and slow to use that way.



--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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On Wed, 30 Apr 2025 02:14:01 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:

Dartmouth BASIC was quite different from the bastardized versions that
became popular on PCs.

They tried selling their “pure” version to the great unwashed PC masses, under the name “True BASIC”. It did not do well.

One major difference was that it was a true compiler.

DEC had BASIC quite heavily integrated into its RSTS/E multiuser operating system for the PDP-11, in the form of BASIC-PLUS. That compiled to byte
code, which was faster to interpret than raw source.

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On Wed, 30 Apr 2025 02:14:01 +0000, John Levine wrote:

Dartmouth BASIC was quite different from the bastardized versions that
became popular on PCs. One major difference was that it was a true
compiler. When you typed RUN it ran the compiler which translated your program into machine code and then ran it. The compiler was so fast that
it wasn't worth saving the object code, just compile it each time

BASIC was my first programming language (apart from a little Mercury Autocode). I first encountered it in January 1971. We used the Kemeny and Kurtz book, although our locally written BASIC was a little different; I
think there were few other books arout.

It was interpreted.

Around 1974, someone wrote a new one, a throwaway JIT version. The system
gave very little memory, so compilation was to a compact interpreted code
from which the source code could be regurgitated; that mean no memory was needed for source. Code was then compiled as required, and then discarded
on a roughly FIFO basis.

BY that time I have moved on, mainly to assembler and BCPL!



--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org

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On 2025-04-30 09:19, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Wed, 30 Apr 2025 02:14:01 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:

Dartmouth BASIC was quite different from the bastardized versions that
became popular on PCs.

They tried selling their “pure” version to the great unwashed PC masses, under the name “True BASIC”. It did not do well.

One major difference was that it was a true compiler.

DEC had BASIC quite heavily integrated into its RSTS/E multiuser operating system for the PDP-11, in the form of BASIC-PLUS. That compiled to byte
code, which was faster to interpret than raw source.

I think the Casio calculator I had saved the programs as byte code. I
did a program that would scan any area of the memory in hex and ascii,
and I found several interesting areas. But I did not have the attachment
to print. I don't remember if it would also save to computer. Maybe
print to serial port?

--
Cheers, Carlos.

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John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote or quoted:

Dartmouth BASIC was quite different from the bastardized versions that became

Today, it's been exactly 61 years since May 1, 1964,
4 a.m. local time, when the first BASIC programs ran
on a General Electric mainframe at Dartmouth College
in New Hampshire.

The first BASIC program:

10 Let X = (7+8)/3
20 PRINT X
30 END

.



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On 4/30/25 12:05 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Wed, 30 Apr 2025 07:19:17 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

DEC had BASIC quite heavily integrated into its RSTS/E multiuser
operating system for the PDP-11, in the form of BASIC-PLUS. That
compiled to byte code, which was faster to interpret than raw source.

That was one of my projects. The company was using BASIC to program their
lab equipment but it was sluggish. Their 'documentation' of the
interpreter was a greenbar print out of a disassembler. it looked suspiciously like a RadioShack ROM.

I am completely confused by this statement. BASIC-PLUS was developed
for RSTS/E before Radio Shack computers exited.

It was also a multi-user timesharing system, in the product space
shared with HP's 2000 timeshared BASIC and DEC's PDP-8 based TSS/8


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Reply-To: slp53@pacbell.net

Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> writes:

On 4/30/25 12:05 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Wed, 30 Apr 2025 07:19:17 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

DEC had BASIC quite heavily integrated into its RSTS/E multiuser
operating system for the PDP-11, in the form of BASIC-PLUS. That
compiled to byte code, which was faster to interpret than raw source.

That was one of my projects. The company was using BASIC to program their
lab equipment but it was sluggish. Their 'documentation' of the
interpreter was a greenbar print out of a disassembler. it looked
suspiciously like a RadioShack ROM.

I am completely confused by this statement. BASIC-PLUS was developed
for RSTS/E before Radio Shack computers exited.

IIRC, tandy/RS sold DIP 74-series logic components at the time,
a ROM chip wouldn't be unexpected. Although I also am not sure
how "the disassembler output looked like a ROM" is interpreted.


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rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On Wed, 30 Apr 2025 12:58:07 -0700, Al Kossow wrote:

On 4/30/25 12:05 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Wed, 30 Apr 2025 07:19:17 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

DEC had BASIC quite heavily integrated into its RSTS/E multiuser
operating system for the PDP-11, in the form of BASIC-PLUS. That
compiled to byte code, which was faster to interpret than raw source.

That was one of my projects. The company was using BASIC to program
their lab equipment but it was sluggish. Their 'documentation' of the
interpreter was a greenbar print out of a disassembler. it looked
suspiciously like a RadioShack ROM.

I am completely confused by this statement. BASIC-PLUS was developed for
RSTS/E before Radio Shack computers exited.

It was also a multi-user timesharing system, in the product space shared
with HP's 2000 timeshared BASIC and DEC's PDP-8 based TSS/8

My comment was not about BASIC-Plus. It was about my task to develop a method to speed up BASIC on laboratory equipment which apparently had been using an interpreter which I believe was lifted from a RadioShack ROM.

Why do you thinks so? Did you compare it to RadioShack ROM?
Some coding idioms were quite common in this era, so some
similarity may be accidental.

In a bit different spirit, equipment manufacturer could made a deal
with RadioShack to use (possibly modified) their ROM.

--
Waldek Hebisch

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