The History of the First Timeshare Operating System and the BASIC Programming Language

In the early 1960s it was considered ridiculous that ordinary students could learn a programming language. But at Dartmouth they thought differently. Using undergraduate student programmers they develop the first timeshare operating system for a computer and invented the BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language. Soon not only computer students but math, science, and liberal arts students were learning to write code and solve problems in a variety of disciplines. Of course it wasn’t long until they wrote one of the first computer games, a football simulation using nothing but a teletype text terminal. The history of this effort is chronicled in this half-hour documentary on YouTube. Check it out.