Re: Wedding photography versus altitude

"J. A. Mc." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> On Wed, 03 Dec 2003 12:26:36 -0500, Alan Browne
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> found these unused words floating
> about:

> BZZZZZZZT !
>
> Sorry, Basic was in existence nearly a decade before hobby computers
> and the beginnings of PC's.

And our 'friend' Gates made his reputation by putting it on a chip, then
breaking the cooperative, sharing paradigm by licensing it. I thought he was
a little twerp then, and today he's just a bigger twerp. But Daddy's million
dollars had to be justified, so he went ballistic.

> The prime version of Basic was developed by Dartmouth College and was
> used on many GE mainframes (via teletype) for labs and engineering
> programming.

GE? I didn't know that. BASIC was a fundamental language of DEC's PDP under
RSTS/e. The OS was not written in BASIC, of course, but many utilities were,
and of course the default user prompt was the BASIC interpreter. But PDPs
finally did better things, like UNIX.. and fostered the implementation of
lots of other languages, much to the discomfort of DEC at the time.

But enough. For some fine reading, get Jean Samet's (sp?) classic book on
the history of programming languages. It has a complete accounting of all
languages that existed at the time of publication - long ago enough that I
don't even want to remember the date.