
New Hampshire installs historical marker to honor the creation of BASIC - Tomte
https://www.concordmonitor.com/BASIC-Dartmouth-Kemeny-time-sharing-historical-26164409
======
tyingq
Went to high school there in the 1980's when DEC was riding high, and had
offices in Nashua, and probably other places in NH. They donated VAX 11/7xx
machines to both our middle and high schools, and it was a boon to my eventual
career.

Took Fortran, Pascal, and C classes before college thanks to them. There was
even a "DEC Store" at the Mall where you could play this ASCII star trek game.
A little odd...as I don't know what mall dwellers were in the market for 5
figure servers. Even the lowly DecStation was at least $10k.

They were VERY involved in the community. Thanks DEC!

~~~
japhyr
Where did you go to high school? I went to Nashua High in the 1980's, and I
don't remember any DEC machines at school. I used an Apple II in elementary
school, but I don't remember using school computers much during high school.

My father worked for DEC when I was young, and I remember going in with him
and playing something like terminal invaders while he did some work on the
weekends. Most of my work with computers before college was at home, and I
really appreciate my parents for investing in home computers at that point in
time.

~~~
tyingq
Manchester. There were VAXes both at Memorial and the middle school across the
grass, Southside.

~~~
lakkal
Lucky you! I was in Salem, where DEC had some facilities (and in fact, I'm
typing this from a building that used to be theirs), and the high school had 3
Apple ][+. They did get a Rainbow from DEC the year after I graduated. I know
Pinkerton in Derry had a PDP of some variety.

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ben7799
Having lived in NH.. there is some computing going on there.

But NH and Nashua in particularly mostly contributes by providing cheaper cost
of living & a right wing atmosphere for people to have a long and painful
commute into Massachusetts where the real jobs are.

It's honestly so bad with the massive # of people that if you're north of
Boston like I am we practically need congestion tolls in town on out of state
people commuting through. The highways are gridlocked almost the whole way
down in the morning & north on the way home at night for 3-4 hours every day
as hundreds of thousands of people commute into Massachusetts to work tech
jobs. Then we got Waze and now they get off the highway and clog up all the
town centers & residential neighborhoods. Sometimes I have trouble getting out
of my own driveway, and the local police told me at one point they did a study
and 50,000 NH cars come through our town at rush hour, and the town only has
13,000 residents including children.

I've never understood why they haven't been able to do a better job luring
companies over the border.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
If you like NH as it is (or close to it) you should be rooting for the commute
to stay terrible or get worse. NH can only be NH and not MA-lite as long as
it's impossible for all but the most dedicated to live in NH and work in the
Boston area.

~~~
claviska
I was born in Manchester and grew up in Epping. My dad was a policeman in
Londonderry when there were about three officers on the force.

Southern New Hampshire (I'd say Manchester and south, but especially Nashua)
has grown so much in the last 30 years...we jokingly call it "Northern Mass."
Most of the "small towns" from my childhood are no longer small by any means.

The reason for this is the abundance of jobs in the Greater Boston Area, which
attracts New Hampshirites looking for those types of opportunities (good luck
finding a non-remote tech job if you live north of Concord). However, it also
has a backflow effect, encouraging Massachusettsans to move to southern New
Hampshire.

The political culture is wildly different between Mass and New Hampshire. A
common complaint from the elders here is how all the "Massholes" are moving to
New Hampshire and want to tax everything. I can see how this growth has
polarized New Hampshire politics, but left much of the rest of the state
intact. I suspect this growth is the primary reason we moved from a
conservative state to a swing state back in the 1990s [1] despite what the
Union Leader suggests.

I'm fortunate enough to not have to be stuck in that commute, but I know many
who aren't as lucky. For them, a high-speed commuter rail into Boston is
probably the best long term solution. Of course, making the commute easier
would encourage more out of staters to relocate here, further changing New
Hampshire's politics.

To many, the Live Free or Die attitude we have is what makes New Hampshire
unique and wonderful. We're proud. We get it. We don't want to be babysat by
the government.

I have mixed feelings about it all.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_New_Hampshire#Elec...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_New_Hampshire#Electoral_shift)

~~~
ben7799
There are things that are sad about how that growth affected southern NH.

I spent huge amounts of time bicycling & motorcycling through NH when I lived
there.

Southwestern NH (everything pretty much west of Nashua) stayed pretty nice
other than the stuff along Rt. 101, the big box nonsense expands further west
along 101 every year and it expanded shockingly between 2000 (when I first
moved there) to 2009 (when I left the 2nd time).

But Southeastern NH.. it feels like one continuous zoning disaster all the way
from Nashua to Portsmouth... almost every main road just turned into a
horrible procession of traffic and stop lights and big box stores and generic
American chain businesses. It's happened lots of places in the US but it's
really bad there.

------
tasty_freeze
When I learned to program in the late 70s it was on a Wang 2200 computer. But
I quickly was exposed to a number of Microsoft BASIC flavors: first hand on
Apple 2 and TRS-80s, plus reading lots of code in BYTE Magazine and Personal
Computing.

Wang BASIC was very different from those -- in some ways very limited, and in
other ways very powerful. But it wasn't until I read the original Dartmouth
BASIC report that I realize Wang had hewed more closely to Dartmouth BASIC
than Microsoft.

[http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dartmouth/BASIC_Oct64.pdf](http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dartmouth/BASIC_Oct64.pdf)

For example, Dartmouth and Wang BASIC both have support for matrix operations:

    
    
      10 DIM A(5,5),B(5,5),C(5,5)
      20 MAT READ A
      30 MAT B=INV(A)
      40 MAT C=A*B
      50 MAT PRINT C
      60 DATA (25 numbers to fill up the array)
    

which would print a 5x5 array that was very close to the identity matrix.

------
claviska
As a New Hampshirite, I always knew there was granite in my blood. I wasn’t
aware there was code, too!

Going to make the short drive to honor this, soon.

------
todd8
Imagine, if you can, a world where no one owned an electronic calculator and
few people had ever seen a computer outside of photographs or TV. I found out
that my high school's school district owned a computer at its administration
building. It was 1967 or 1968.

I decided to write a program and see if someone at the school district would
run it for me. I picked up a book on FORTRAN (I still own it) and tried
writing my first program. It was a disaster.

After key punching the program on an IBM 026 keypunch machine (keypunch
machines back then were mainly used for data entry, the parentheses, the
equals sign, and the plus signs weren't even on the keyboard), I gave the deck
of cards to a friend. He agreed to run it at the administration building, and
the following week (one week turnaround time) I was informed that my program
had syntax errors, :(

Because of BASIC, my next attempt went much better. I realized I didn't know
what I was doing, but I was able to find a book on BASIC and studied it
carefully one weekend. BASIC was so easy to understand that I learned from
that book how programs work.

I didn't have BASIC available at the school district, but it had served its
intended purpose--it explained programming to me--and armed with what that
BASIC book had taught me, I went back to FORTRAN and successfully wrote my
first program.

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userbinator
_Last August, I wrote in this column that the 255 official historical markers_

Who else noticed the 255 and thought it'd be related in some way? I don't know
if it's intentional or a lucky coincidence, but I really like the fact that
the BASIC marker is the 256th.

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OliverJones
New Hampshire, for what it’s worth, also has a highway marker commemorating an
alien abduction. Located on the southbound side of highway 3 through Franconia
Notch, it reads.

Betty and Barney Hill Incident

On the night of September 19-20, 1961, Portsmouth, NH couple Betty and Barney
Hill experienced a close encounter with an unidentified flying object and two
hours of "lost" time while driving south on Rte 3 near LIncoln. They filed an
official Air Force Project Blue Book report of a brightly-lit cigar-shaped
craft the next day, but were not public with their story until it was leaked
in the Boston Traveler in 1965. This was the first widely-reported UFO
abduction report in the United States.

Ya can’t make this stuff up! Oh, wait …

~~~
tgb
Not a state historical marker but the NH town of New Boston has a plaque in
the center of town honoring the anti-gravity research done nearby.

~~~
rgacote
And that was pretty serious research at the time. The Gravity Research
foundation was founded by Roger Babson (who also founded Babson College). At
the time, the nature of gravity was not well understood. If it was a "wave"
then it could be blocked, i.e Anti Gravity!

The New Boston historical society has a nice link, as does Wikipedia (which
mentions Edison suggesting the idea to Babson):

[http://www.newbostonhistoricalsociety.com/gravity.html](http://www.newbostonhistoricalsociety.com/gravity.html)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Research_Foundation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Research_Foundation)

An annual essay contest lives on. Several Nobel lauriets have won that prize
including well recognized names like Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose.

------
analog31
I started with BASIC, ca. 1981. I think that while VisiCalc is often hailed as
the seminal "killer app," BASIC may deserve a close second place. Being able
to turn on a computer and start entering a simple program, or create and share
simple apps, was why a lot of people bought early microcomputers, including
probably most scientists and hobbyists.

And yes, I'm mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. ;-)

------
musicale
BASIC is great and all, but where's the historical marker for Lisp? ;-)

(edit: apparently it should be in Cambridge since John McCarthy had moved from
Dartmouth to MIT by 1958.)

But modern AI largely started in New Hampshire at the Dartmouth Workshop in
1956.

------
throwaway2016a
As someone who moved from Boston to Nashua 10 years ago for startup in New
Hampshire I find it interesting to see here. Looking forward to see all the
Granite Staters come out of the woodwork.

But the title might be a bit miss-leading. I think this is just the first "in
New Hampshire" not the first one , period.

------
dnautics
Just to be clear, I believe this is the first highway marker in _new
Hampshire_. There is a highway marker in Arlington Virginia, honoring ARPANET
complete with a binary ASCII secret message, and I believe one for Grace
hopper as well (could be wrong about the second)

~~~
FillardMillmore
They noted the following in the article, "There are other historical markers
for computer-related topics...but this one appears to be the first
specifically for the creation of a programming language."

------
ky3
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have
had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally
mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." \-- Edsger W. Dijkstra

~~~
progman32
"About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt
axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead." \--
Edsger W. Dijkstra

Of course, all this is to be taken with a grain of salt :) I got started in
QBASIC and, for all the damage it may have caused, I'm doing pretty OK today.
I tried to grasp C back then but I wasn't able to yet. BASIC let me play along
with the adults while I developed other necessary skills.

~~~
badsectoracula
> I got started in QBASIC and, for all the damage it may have caused, I'm
> doing pretty OK today

Dijkstra wrote that quote about a very different flavor of BASIC: only line
numbers, flow control was only possible with GOTO and a limited version of
FOR/NEXT, IF was limited to a single line of code (which 99% was just a GOTO
or GOSUB), subroutines were made using GOSUB/RETURN, etc, essentially it was a
glorified assembler with an expression generator.

What he was championing instead (at the time) was structured programming in
the style of Algol and QBASIC, with its subroutines, control structures,
functions, lack of line numbers (well, they were optional for backwards
compatibility with GW-BASIC, but i do not think it got much use) etc, is way
closer to the style of programming used in Algol than to the style used in the
BASIC that he was talking about.

------
slartibardfast0
Oh, how wonderful. I'd like to highlight how BASIC is still relevant, in a
cute or retro kind of way in the form of Basic-256 & cheerful books, that
might pass the nine year old test!

[http://www.basic256.org/index_en](http://www.basic256.org/index_en)

[https://www.amazon.com/You-Want-Learn-Program-
Second/dp/1494...](https://www.amazon.com/You-Want-Learn-Program-
Second/dp/1494859394)

------
veganjay
In related News Hampshire historical nerd news: There is a statue of Ralph
Baer (developed first video game) in Manchester.

[https://www.concordmonitor.com/ralph-baer-video-pioneer-
manc...](https://www.concordmonitor.com/ralph-baer-video-pioneer-manchester-
nh-25439263)

------
gwbas1c
> Everybody who has ever typed a GOTO command can feel proud.

Oh gosh no.

~~~
ternaryoperator
On top of which, it's factually wrong. GOTO (also in caps) was used in COBOL
for years before it showed up in BASIC.

------
chrisseaton
Why's the sign on a road, though?

~~~
Devon64327
It's stated in the article.

> "...state historical markers are reserved for state highways, and all of the
> roads in and out of Dartmouth are city streets."

~~~
chrisseaton
That doesn't answer the question. That just says historical markers are
reserved for state highways. I'm asking 'why are they reserved for state
highways, or any highway at all?' Why put a historical sign on a road of all
places?

It's like they stuck the sign on an elephant, and I'm asking why, and your
answer is 'because it's an elephant sign'. Yeah I get that... but why is it an
elephant sign?

~~~
ghaff
There are all sorts of historical markers on various things and in various
places all over the US. (Though I'm not aware of any at Dartmouth College
regarding the computer-related events that occurred there.) These particular
markers are ones put up on NH state highways where they're fairly visible even
to people not actively looking for them.

~~~
thrower123
If I recall, there is a plaque in the lobby of Kemeny Hall at Dartmouth about
Kemeny's role in creating Basic.

New Hampshire has these green historic signs all over the place - they are
particularly thick in the seacoast region, for historic buildings or places
where events of any kind of significance took place. For example, in downtown
Exeter, there is one by the town hall commemorating a speech that Abraham
Lincoln gave during his presidential campaign, also noting that his son went
to Phillips Exeter, and across the street there is another marking that Exeter
was once the capital of New Hampshire, and then a couple hundred yards away
there is another marking where a tavern still stands that George Washington
once ate dinner.

~~~
sib
Later in life, Lincoln's son, Robert Todd Lincoln, built a large house called
Hildene in southern Vermont that was occupied by descendants into the 1970's.
It is maintained as a museum. It's pretty interesting and worth a trip, if
you're into that sort of thing. Even my two teenagers found it interesting ;)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildene)

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booleandilemma
Feel old yet?

------
luckyorlame
too bad there is not date on placement on it, since it says Basic is still
being used. I imagine it will be possible that time in the future this won't
be true anymore and withot a date it will be hard to tell.

~~~
cbm-vic-20
There are historical markers in New England that are 100+ years old
themselves. I don't think there's a meta-marker yet.

------
SpaceL10n
_waves from his desk in Concord, NH_

------
sbassi
can someone post google maps coordinates for this?

------
dang
Url changed from [https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/16/18680941/new-hampshire-
ba...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/16/18680941/new-hampshire-basic-first-
historical-marker-beginners-all-purpose-symbolic-instruction-code), which
points to this.

