An interesting bit of computing history. From GE Reports:
It’s BASIC: Arnold Spielberg and the Birth of Personal Computing
From Thomas Edison to former President Ronald Reagan and novelist Kurt Vonnegut, GE has employed a number of luminaries over the course of its 123-year history. One famous last name that’s been missing from this list is Spielberg.
In the late 1950s, Arnold Spielberg, the father of Hollywood director Steven Spielberg, helped revolutionize computing when he designed the GE-225 mainframe computer. The machine allowed a team of Dartmouth University students and researchers to develop the BASIC programing language, an easy-to-use coding tool that quickly spread and ushered in the era of personal computers. (Young Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs all used the language when they started building their digital empires.)
“I remember visiting the plant when dad was working on the GE-225,” Steven Spielberg told GE Reports. “I walked through rooms that were so bright, I recall it hurting my eyes. Dad explained how his computer was expected to perform, but the language of computer science in those days was like Greek to me. It all seemed very exciting, but it was very much out of my reach, until the 1980s, when I realized what pioneers like my dad had created were now the things I could not live without.”
The Dartmouth team ran BASIC, or Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, on the GE-225 for the first time a half-century ago, on May 1, 1964.
Little acorns / mighty oaks... My parents lived in Hanover, New Hampshire (home of Dartmouth) for ten years. I got my Dad his first computer (Apple IIe) for Christmas and set him up with an account on the Dartmouth system. He wrote textbooks and the computer was a godsend to him. Got him switched over to IBMs when they got to be decent. John Kemeny, the co-developer of BASIC, was president of Dartmouth at that time.
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