Programming Windows: BASIC Inventors Take on Gates, Microsoft (Premium)

As noted in Programming Windows: Microsoft Basic (Premium), the BASIC programming language was created in 1964 by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, two educators at Dartmouth College who wanted a programming language that was simple enough for non-engineers and scientists to use. Then, over a decade later, Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed a BASIC implementation for the MITS Altair and cofounded Microsoft to sell that product.

As genesis stories go, it’s a good one. And for those who care about BASIC, it’s pretty impressive that Microsoft continued supporting and advancing the language well into the 21st century. I’m particularly enamored of the work that Microsoft did with Visual Basic, which I feel respected the spirit of the language by making programming accessible to a new generation of developers and enthusiasts raised on GUIs.

So, I was fascinated---and a bit irritated---to discover that BASIC inventors Kemeny and Kurtz, when given a platform by Byte Magazine in 1990, used it to do little more than criticize Bill Gates, Microsoft, and the versions of BASIC that they had ridden to great success.

The irritation comes from the fact that Kemeny and Kurtz were at the time trying to sell their own commercial version of BASIC, called True BASIC, a product I had completely forgotten. It’s clear that part of their disdain for Microsoft’s BASICs is pure---driven by their love of their creation. But it’s likewise clear that these two disgruntled educators also used a very public soapbox to sell their own product too.

I’ll let you form your own opinion on whether that’s OK. But for the full context, we need to briefly discuss True BASIC first.

Kemeny and Kurtz had never copyrighted the BASIC language and they were taken aback by the different implementations that appeared throughout the late 1970s, which they called "street BASIC." So, they sought to standardize the language, as would later be done with C and C++, in this case through the ANSI standards body. To do so, they added string variable support to their Dartmouth BASIC and branded the result as Minimal BASIC. Then, they added structured programming features, bringing it more in line with more sophisticated languages like C. This was named Standard BASIC (SBASIC).

The effort succeeded, as ANSI ratified both versions of BASIC. But by that time, Microsoft BASIC was already embedded in millions of different personal computers worldwide, making the standard pointless. Microsoft had, in a sense, usurped control of BASIC by creating a de facto standard. So, they withdrew their BASICs from standardization and decided to create a commercial product instead. This was called True BASIC.

True BASIC was released in 1985. It didn’t require line numbers or GOTO statements, and it supported advanced structured programming capabilities via subroutines with global and local variables. And in a very future-leaning move, True BASIC was designed such that it w...

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