College Computing

It started at Dartmouth with a democratic attitude the notion that making computers pervasive is more important than making them powerful. First came BASIC, a computer program-writing language invented by College mathematicians John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. Designed to be used with a minimum of training, BASIC was taught as part of a course required of most students during the 19605. The Mathematics Department estimated that, at its peak, BASIC was understood by 80 percent of Dartmouth undergraduates at a time when computers were exotic to most Americans.

But the Dartmouth administration went farther, absorbing students' cost of using the equipment. Elsewhere, graduate and undergraduate students, who lacked the grant funding that drove computer-intensive research projects, were at the bottom of the priority list.

The College went stiLl farther. With the help of undergraduates, Kemeny and Kurtz devised the notion of time-sharing, in which mainframe computers are linked with widespread terminals. The system was the first in the world to get largescale use.

Dartmouth's openness with its innovations allowed the widespread dispersal of BASIC to other institutions and even into the commercial realm. The giant Digital Equipment Corporation picked up the BASIC language and used a version on its computers in the late 19605. And young hackers used the language on some radical new inventions. Example: in 1975 a pair of budding programmers named Bill Gates and Paul Allen invented a means of adapting BASIC to the four-kilobyte Altair. thus creating software for the very first personal computer. The two young men won a prize with their program and formed a company to accept the royalties. They called it "Micro-Soft" and lived happily ever after. Gates is now the richest man in America.

Billionaire Gates started With Green software.