Do you know DOPE, the little-known precursor to basic and general computing?

When computers were invented, it seemed clear to scientists and the small minority of people who understood the possibilities at the time that this still young technology would revolutionize the world.

Saying it or thinking about it is one thing, but convincing the general public to adopt a technology is definitely revolutionary, but yet another intended purpose for specialists is another.

To do this, it was necessary to invent programming languages ​​that did not require previous computer skills, the basics of which could be learned in a few hours.

This is how BASIC was born in 1964, a simple language that became very popular in the 1970s. Originally intended for Dartmouth University, BASIC was easy to administer by students of all disciplines, unlike other languages. Languages ​​of time, such as Fortran, to be learned by scholars.

But BASIC didn’t happen overnight. It all started in a lesser known language, DOPE. In the 1950s and 1960s, John Kimene and Thomas Kurtz, inventors of BASIC, were already working on a computer language for beginners. Thus was born Dartmouth’s simplified programming experience.

Used one year

Casting the motherboardProgrammer Sean Haas recounts his discovery of this nearly forgotten experience. And with good reason, DOPE has only been used for one academic year, and one math class.

Haas goes into detail in his article, but DOPE is essentially an illegal language, torn between classical computing and super-simplistic language.

It lacks a number of features, which prevents it from being effective in anything other than basic math. Plus, it is still difficult to understand for beginners.

One example among others, DOPE does not separate characters with spaces. It’s not necessarily more complicated, but it is less instinctive than BASIC, which separates everything with a space, as one does when writing naturally.

It is no coincidence that DOPE has only been used for one semester by a handful of mathematics students. These guys served as guinea pigs, in order to further understand how to simplify computer language.

Little is known, but on this imperfect base, Kemeni and Kurtz were able to build BASIC, the computer language that then spread to miniature computers and then to miniature computers, widely distributed, and shaped for many The first door to information technology.