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jwstarr | 3 years ago

Dramatically, the Dartmouth experiment in teaching BASIC to all undergraduates could be profitable. Although they didn't use PDPs (they used a GE-265), it was the same time period. You have two visionaries, Kemeny and Kurtz, trying to bring a computer to every student and every faculty member. Kemeny's background allows appearances from Feynman, von Neumann, Alonzo Church, and Einstein. With the work happening in college, and being educational rather than pure research, students can be integral members of the plot and a couple working together to understand this new language and the concepts of time-sharing can lead naturally to romance.

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pjmlp|3 years ago

Also an eye opener that the original BASIC implementation used a JIT based REPL, only with 8 bit home computing scene did interpreters came into play due to hardware restrictions.