Retronauts - 742: Dartmouth TSS and the Birth of BASIC

Episode Date: January 26, 2026

This computer network speaks BASIC! Kevin Bunch, Dr. Joy Lisi Rankin, and Annette Vee talk about the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, the birth of BASIC, and how it brought computer games to the public.Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This week on Retronauts, print. Hello, World. Hello, and welcome to another edition of Retronauts. I'm your host, Kevin Bunch, and I hope you're excited to get into another fairly obscure topic, because that's kind of my thing here. No, you should absolutely stick around. If you are interested in computer gaming, computer history, pre-internet networking, and what is likely the first computer language that was actually easy to learn. So to that end, we are celebrating the genesis of the basic computer language and the Dartmouth time sharing system, which are sort of two intertwined threads, very influential on public computer usage and gaming. And before we get into that, I'd like to let everyone know, who is joining me? Who are my extremely learned guests?

All right. I guess we're introducing ourselves. My name is Annette V. and I'm currently an associate professor of English, of all things, at the University of Pittsburgh. But my research has generally been about the intersection between computation and writing. And so I got really into basic because I was very interested in it, as you said, like it was the first language that was really kind of easy to learn. There were precursors, which I'm sure we'll talk about. But I was very interested in John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz's approach to trying to teach everybody at

computer programming. So I wrote a book called coding literacy, where I traced the whole history of that kind of computer programming for all that happened before code.org and all that kind of more popular push. And I had come to that because of an earlier history of I had a short stint after college working in the game industry. So I worked for Activision for a little company called Raven Software, which now does call of duty mods and so or expansion packs so anyway so that's kind of a little bit of my background that's that's relevant here but I've spent a lot of time thinking about basic and I'm excited to be here thanks Kevin and who else do we have joining us I'm Joy Lisey Rankin I am a historian I like Annette also worked in a startup actually after college that was doing

online learning for English as a second language or English as a foreign language learners. But this was back in the early 2000s. Before Zoom, before Skype, before even really voice over IP, was something that was widespread. And I actually worked in a bunch of different sort of places at the intersection of education and technology before I went to grad school to study history. of science and technology more formally. And I've always been interested in thinking about community, technology, gender, and race. And those things in part led me to write my first book, which is a people's history of

computing in the United States, in which Dartmouth College and John Kemany and Tom Kurtz and Basic feature prominently. Really looking back to the 1960s and 1970s for the origins of personal computing and social networking, social media, long before anyone really thought in those terms. So I'm delighted to be here as well. Yeah. Very happy to have both of you. I've appreciated both of your works writing about Basic and Dartmouth timeshare.

system in general. So, you know, when I had the idea to do a podcast about it, I'm like, well, I know the two people I want to try and get for it. And I'm happy you both were on board for it. So I guess, like, we sort of touched out a little bit, but I don't think any of us were around when the Dartmouth time sharing system was in its heyday, certainly, because this got started around 1964, and it didn't get unplugged, I would say, until about 1990. And I have to imagine in the 30 odd years between those two, it changed a fair bit.

But yeah. So we've touched about a little bit. But what interested both of you in this history? I'll start because, and I don't think this is always obvious from my bio, but I was an undergrad at Dartmouth College in the 90s. And knew even none. had a very strong computing culture. So I had email before all of my friends did,

before email was a widespread thing. That's just how it was called blitzmail. And it was like texting, except we were using personal computer terminals, but there were public terminals around the campus. Everybody had to, it was a requirement to buy a computer. So it was a very computing oriented. culture and I was a math in history double major. And even then, mathematics at Dartmouth was heavily, I would say computer science was a separate major, but they were closely connected.

So I took a number of courses that were cross-listed. But it was just, I didn't know until I left how pervasive computing was there. And it was something, though, that while I was there, I didn't study the history at all, didn't. I knew who Kemini was because he is beloved and was a president of college. But I didn't know anything about what I later came to write a book about. But just really sort of over the course of my work later on after college, just kept being struck by like, my students always use technology in ways that were surprising and creative and almost always so they could connect with each other, like talk, gossip, chat, help each other out. And when I was reading histories of computing or technology more generally, those stories weren't there. And so I was like, I need to go find more stories like what I will reflect my experience, what I know to be true.

And so I don't think it was a huge surprise that I was like, well, Dartmouth was a place like that. Let me see what I find. And of course, you know, I walked into like a dream in terms of research and findings, et cetera. So that was for me, why Dartmouth and basic. Yeah. And then I think like Annette, I know in your article you mentioned that you were programming on Commodore 64 in the early 80s. as was I, and probably in some version of basic. And so these, like, pieces of my history came into my research in lovely ways.

Yeah. Yeah, I have to say, I'm really impressed at just how thorough the records are at the Rounder Library about all the time sharing system. I wish more universities and just like, I don't know, archives in general were so thorough. Yes, yes. I shout out to Roner, grateful. All librarians and archivists, actually, I think are doing heroic work that's often unrecognized. Yeah.

You're here. Yeah. I had excellent experiences at the Ronner library, too. even as a Princeton grad I feel like I have to admit that I think Joy and I probably were an undergrad around the same time and my experience with Dartmouth

was that we would like when we were playing them in football you would say duck fart mouth so this is like you know whatever like old school I mean rivalry here which like I don't necessarily want to admit to but I do know like when I was looking back at the record for Dartmouth football like the one thing that like

irritates me, of course, as like Princeton is the, is the opposing team and, and that's my alma mater. But Dartmouth was like way better at this stuff in the 1960s. And I was interested in it because, you know, to like go back even further, I had, you know, done, you know, a little bit of basic programming on my Commodore 64 when I was a kid because I was just, you know, there was the whole push of, you know, let's beat the Russians. And, you know, everybody had the Apple 2 or Apple 2E, you know, in elementary school. and we got, you know, some used Commodore 64 from some friend or something. I don't even know the origin of it, but I had like a whole bunch of floppy disks. And that was kind of, I was interested in that through middle school. And then I discovered that girls didn't do that. And computers were for boys. And then I kind of dropped it.

And then I was an English major, which was, you know, great. I mean, here, I'm an English professor now. But after college, and I took no courses in computer science. I like, that was like way way behind me. And after college, I ended up getting a job at this computer game company, Raven Software in Madison, Wisconsin, and for various personal reasons. And it was a really super interesting place to work. I got the job there in 2000. And I worked there for just a couple of years, you know, in the first person shooter era. And I was effectively like a secretary slash HR person. I was one of two women there out of 52 employees.

And it was actually a fabulous place to work. Like I, the guys taught me stuff about IT. I picked up a lot of other things. I went back to programming. And it was kind of like a reclamation of an alternative history that could have been in my life. And I was glad to go back into it. And at the time, it felt like too late to go deeper into that. And I went, I went back to graduate school in English, which was really the only thing I was kind of qualified to do, I felt.

I'd done K-12 teaching and stuff like that. But so when I went back to school in English and I was studying literacy, I was very interested in teaching and literacy and things like that. And I kind of, once I was reading these histories of literacy, I thought, oh, my gosh, this is like exactly what the guys talk about with like how computer programming feels. You know, that it's like it's a kind of writing and it's expressive and, you know, it like works your brain in certain ways. And I was like, oh, my gosh, right?

is like programming and I thought, you know, like many graduate students, I thought like this was my idea. Like nobody had made this connection before. Of course, you're laughing because you know, like that's just BS, right? Like that, you know, like any beginning graduates of course. And so then I dug back and I was like, actually, people have been thinking about this since at least 1959. But in particular, Kemen and Kurtz were like really on this in the early 1960s. And that's when I started kind of getting into this whole history and thinking about, you know, how do I almost like make sense of my whole life in some ways? But then, you know, how to dig back into this history and, you know, and I can say more about like how I ended up specifically at Dartmouth, but that was kind of my origin story into this as well. Okay.

Well, as for myself, so I learned on computers at school, but obviously nothing. networked. It was just like some Apple 2s. At home, we had a Texas Instruments computer that was formerly from a school. So what we had for that was just like some educational cartridges. Eventually, we got a Commodore 64, which I tried like messing with programming, but I didn't have any like materials to teach me how that worked. And I couldn't figure out how the floppy disks operated because we had gotten the thing secondhand. So that really didn't go anywhere. So my basic experiences kind of didn't really go very far until, you know, sort of high school in the late 90s when I started messing around with Q Basic and

playing a lot of, you know, guerrillas and whatnot on there. But in recent years, I've gotten very interested in sort of what the community programmers have done, or had done rather, with Basic for very specific niche hardware, like the Bally Arcade console, which had a basic cartridge and cassette interface, and people just sort of made their own games and programs and art stuff and printing programs and all sorts of fun, weird stuff. And that sort of threw me down a rabbit hole. It's like, you know, really anyone could make a game or whatever program they needed. And one thing led to another. and I found myself reading about 1950s and 60s computing.

And here we are. It was a wild time. Like it was just, I felt like so imaginative. And, you know, I mean, like, really, it seems like there was just, there was so much to do that there was a lot being done in lots of different places. Yeah. And a big sense of possibility. I mean, that's what struck me talking with. I mean, both in research.

So researching my book, not just reading whatever I read in terms of newsletters and not just at Dartmouth, right? But there are timesharing systems that are running Basic in Minnesota, ends up having a statewide network. And then, of course, it spreads through California. Well, we can get to sort of the spread of Basic. But, like, also, I ended up talking to alums of the college who were there or just people who learned programming in Basic in the 60s and the 70s.

And they just really all had this sense of like, if you wanted to build it, it would be possible. Or if you wanted to create it, if you could imagine it. And I just still remember one conversation with a Dartmouth alum who said, you know, I was at Dartmouth. It was, you know, this like small school in the wilderness of New Hampshire in the 1960s. And he was like, I didn't, he was like, I didn't think much of. where I was until I went to grad school at Berkeley and felt like Dartmouth was so far ahead in terms of computing and access for undergraduates and sort of what was possible and doable and even just the literacy, right, of basic among the undergraduates. Because after Kemeni and

Kurtz sort of implement this time sharing system, along with a requirement for the students to learn how to program, like 80% of students within four years are regularly programming, which is phenomenal. Yeah. Yeah. Just imagining if my university I went to in Detroit did that. It would have been a wild time. Yeah, I think that's a good place to sort of jump off.

Like, what did computing look like in the 50s and 60s? like outside of Dartmouth, really. So my understanding is that it was a lot of mainframe computers that were very, like, siloed away from the public, you know, talking stuff made for businesses and military. If universities got a computer, probably there was a sort of a Department of Defense bent to it. I know one, yeah. Yeah, no, I was going to, that's all accurate, right? And the mainframes are big. They're like very large.

They're in their own rooms, often with a dedicated operator or operating team, the sort of high priestesses or high priests of the computer temple. And right, computing, I think it's hard for us to imagine now, but it was really only associated with generally like military, scientific business approaches. It was not day-to-day. It was not quotidian. I love the story of Tom Kurtz. So MIT had a computing center that was sort of opened up to other colleges and universities across New England in the 1950s. And in the 50s, Tom Kurtz would take the train to MIT carrying punch cards with his program.

So write these mainframes, you're not programming them directly. like punching out cards yourself or having someone, a key punch operator, punch them for you to create your program. Your program is 500 cards that have to be all in a row just right. If one gets out of place, your program might have an error. So Tom Kurtz is carrying a suitcase from New Hampshire on the train to Boston to Cambridge, Massachusetts that contain not just his programs, but the programs of his colleagues at Dartmouth, because this is how they're accessing computing. And he hands over the cards. He hands over the suitcase. He goes and has lunch with a colleague. He maybe walks around along the Charles River. And at the end of the day, he gets a pile of

printouts and the cards back. And he sits on the train and he looks through the printout results of his program. And he can see, did it run? Like, what are the results? Was there? an error? If there's an error, he has to wait two weeks or a month to repeat this whole process. I mean, it's such a very, like, visual, tactile sense of, like, what it meant to have access to a computer was, like, a day-long project to run a single program that you might then have to wait two weeks or a month to, like, quote, debug. And he and Kemeny still at that time felt both grateful to even have that access, that computing time, but also the awareness of like computing is really powerful. And, you know, they really wanted to make it more accessible. So yeah.

Yeah. And I love that you told that story, Joy, because it's such a, it's such an origin story for Basic because it, it determined a lot of their design, design decisions later. You know, they were working with at that time, they started out working with some programming language called SAP, which was like predated Fortran. This was in the 1950s before Fortran. And Fortran feels maybe a little arcane now if you were looking at it. But like Fortran was a revelation for how easy it was, you know, especially for math and science folks who were using it. Because and what they realized is, you know, if they had some error in the code, then they would have to, as I said, you know, wait two weeks, wait a month, et cetera. And so if your language was hard to write in,

it was more likely that you would make an error. And even if the execution would happen faster, the idea of waiting two weeks was like just miserable, right? And so the tradeoff, and this was something big in the 1950s with computing actually because of, you know, computing was incredibly expensive. So it could be used for things that were like serious, you know. So that was, you know, defense, heavy, you know, calculations for various things, right? But primarily military, you know, physics, whatever, right? And this tradeoff between programmer time and the efficiency of the code was really, at that time, you know, John McCarthy was very influential in this too.

And he, you know, very strongly believed in the efficiency of the computer. Like, you should always have something, you know, your language should be geared towards the efficiency of the computer. What is cheaper to execute is then what you would, what would be preferable, right? And so like the programmer would have to learn all of these things in order to, you know, write a more difficult language. Like how many and Kurtz ended up on the other side of that, which is that it would be better to have an easier language to write because even if it were less efficient when you executed it, you would be less likely to have errors. more people would be likely to use it. And that was, you know, I mean, just really influential to the design of basic

across a number of different decisions that they made. Yeah, I've interviewed a few people who were computing in the 50s and 60s and even the 70s, and all of them have nothing but very unpleasant words to say about having to use the punch cards, having to use Fortran. And so once things moved towards basic and having that sort of level of abstraction, you know, they seemed much happier with that. And just generally, like, computing might have been slower because there's a level of abstraction that didn't exist before. But it was certainly easier to use.

And as computers became more, you know, accessible, I'd say that was probably a big positive. And yeah, you mentioned that you couldn't really get a lot. lot of frivolities and whimsy on computers at the time. And that's very true. There's a computer program from like 1953 for the Mid-Sack, which was a computer at the University of Michigan. And it's a pool game, right? And they programmed this for a demonstration to like Detroit area business leaders of the computer business and I think some political leaders as well. And they were just like, yeah, look at how this cool thing our computer can do. And what they weren't. telling anyone because it was classified is that this machine was to like manage guidance systems

for aircraft and missiles and like a pool program was kind of in the same wheelhouse of what they would be using it for because it's a lot of calculations. That's like effectively Ender's game right there only in real life, right? Like surprise, you're actually at war. Yeah, it cracks me up. And like I talked with some folks who worked at RCA and they remembered like when they were trying to sell the U.S. Navy on a computer, they set up like a little demonstration program that would play anchors away while it was calculating using the like, you know, all the equipment on the computer.

So like you got like some little bits of whimsy, but it was always just sort of like incidental really to what they were actually doing. And this is another fun little anecdote. Like if you were really technically minded and really dedicated, you could build yourself a little analog computer to do like one thing. And my example that I understand, and I believe the unit itself is at the Strong Museum in Rochester, but Joe Weisbecker,

who is an RCA computer engineer and one of the developers of the 1802 micro processor, in the 50s, when he was a student, he built a Tick-Tac-Tow playing computer. That's all it could do. He just bought a bunch of

old pinball parts and sort of assembled them in such a way that it could do this. So that's your public computing in the 50s, I guess. Well, I do think it's important to note, though, that there was, like, there was fun happening underneath this. Like, even though the official line was defense, blah, blah, blah, right? Like, we know, you know, Alan Turing, right?

And but we know his contemporary Christopher Strachie had designed this, you know, love letter generator, which was, I mean, it's a riot, you know, all these, like, satirical love letters that are signed from, the computer to, you know, folks in the lab or whatever. And it was, you know, it was an early automated writing, um, kind of, um, randomized string, you know, kind of thing. And if you see the original code, too, like it's not, you know, there's emulators online, which are great to play with. And, you know, I've taught with that and things like that. But, you know, at that time, people were programming by like literally punching, you know, like, like putting, uh, like, you know,

whatever, the electronics, you know, right? It wasn't even, this was free punch cards. Um, and so, you know, they're moving like chords from this and that, cables and stuff like that. And so I just think it's funny. You know, they also, like they had designed a Turing head. They, you know, the, whatever, that computing institute in the UK that I'm blanking on, you know, just recently came up with an old recording where they, like, there was some sort of audio that would come out of the result of, you know, one of these British computers, right?

And so they would, they programmed it in order to like make God save the question. Queen. Like, I mean, that's just funny, right? And they do this like in the middle of the night. And, you know, so I do think, and there, you know, there's a lot of work on this too. You know, there's that book where wizards stay up late. And, you know, there's like, there's a whole history of the kind of what happens after hours. What happens when the computer is not being used 24 hours a day is people figure out how to play games on it and how to be fun, you know, doing whatever random fun things. And that's why I felt like Kemeny and Kurtz, like, recognize this as a possibility for. learning because games are fun. And this was, you know, I mean, you're not going to get a bunch of undergrads being like super invested in ballistics. I hope. You do. Like, that's just wrong.

Like, that's just bad for the world. So I think that their emphasis on games was deeply connected to their interest in making the computer accessible and interesting to a wide variety of people. The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast. This slow one now will later be fast As the present now We'll later be past The order is rapidly fading

And the first one now For the times They are changing Yeah there was really the They weren't the only people I've heard from From that time period Who were like, well, if you want people to be on board with computing, to find computers not terrifying and unknowable, like, have them play a game, have them figure out like, oh, this can be like a fun machine, too. It's not, doesn't have to be, you know, this obelisk in another room that has to be kept cold at all times. And, you know, that really works to the Dartmouth time sharing system. Boy, it's a bit of a tongue twister right there.

which yeah, we can, I think this is a good time to like sort of get into what sets this thing apart. Because really from the ground up, this was conceived as to make computer usage accessible to like students and faculty alike at no like additional charge beyond, you know, having to go to Dartmouth. It was really opposite the model of all computing that had. come before in the sense that, I mean, I still remember like this stood out so much. So when Khamini and Kurtz sort of wrote their proposal, both for the trustees, the National Science Foundation, etc. For this system that they envisioned, they said a few things that really stood out and made it transformative. And one was that the system would maximize the convenience of the user and maximize meaning and maximize the convenience and time of the human, not maximize the time or the money

of the computer, which is really how all mainframes operated because we're talking, you know, back of the 1950s, even 1960s mainframes cost literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. Companies or universities are often leasing them if not buying them outright. And so they're trying to keep the computer running as much as possible, which means, like batching programs, running them one after the other, not letting individuals have access per se. And so Kemeny and Kurtz said, no, we're not going to do it that way. We're going to figure out a system that is most useful for an individual and a group of individuals. And also, that it would be comparable to an open stack library system in the sense, both that anyone could

sit down at a terminal and interact in the way that in an open stack library, you can go pull off a shelf, which to compare to a closed stack is like you're handing over a ticket to have the librarian fetch your book, but also that it would be free, meaning that the students, the faculty, whoever was on the system, would not have to pay to use it. So sort of those principles, really guided as they were programming the system and deciding how to do it. And I should know, Kurtz really led in programming the system itself, but working closely with undergraduate students who Kemney and Kurtz had realized from the 50s onward had quite an aptitude and interest in doing this kind of programming. But that at every time there was a choice to be made in programming,

this system that really it would be what is best for the user and what will make it most convenient and most accessible. And I should say, I should back up because some of the things I take for granted, or I suspect we all do in this conversation, the way people access this system was using a teletype terminal or a teletypewriter, which was basically like a typewriter with a printer built in is the best way I can explain it. They had been developed for telegraphy. And then it turns out we're quite useful in time sharing. And you would type your command, your program, whatever onto the teletype, you could see it as you were typing. And then at some point, you would send your command or your program to the mainframe. And it would run. And then the mainframe would send

the commands to be printed or results back to you, and then you would see that print out as well. And so time sharing as a concept meant not that users were sharing the time of the computer, which they were, but actually originally referred to the fact that the computer would be programmed to interrupt itself to sort of recognize new programs coming in and to prioritize shorter programs over longer ones and this kind of thing so that it was dividing its own time among multiple users. And that was the nature of the system. So you could have three or four or five or 50 teletypes connected and people would have a sense of near instantaneous response, certainly compared to two weeks or a month waiting to debug a

program. Right. That's right. And when they were designing this system, they realized like they needed. two things and one was a language that was reasonably accessible and Fortran wasn't going to cut it. It took them a little while to realize that. And I guess Kemeny had believed in that first and Kurtz then said later he was convinced of that. And they needed to feel, you needed to get like reasonable feedback in a reasonable amount of time. And that's what, you know, like batch processing wasn't going

to work for that. So you needed this teletype kind of time sharing system. And so, you know, then they were designing both DTSS, the Dartmouth time sharing system and basic at the same time, which when you look back at it, is insane because, and DTSS is like not as, like, it's not as much of a household name as, you know, basic the computer language. But it was actually probably even more influential because nobody had figured out time sharing. And, you know, I mean, even all these big companies, like IBM hadn't figured it out, GE hadn't figured it out. And here was, you know, these two math professors who were, you know, quite intelligent people, right? And a bunch of rag-tag, you know, Dartmouth undergrads figuring out, you know, many of them on work study, you know, they weren't necessarily like, you know, whatever super technical, right?

Some of them just got assigned to this lab. And they figured these things out. And, you know, it's kind of, they wrote, Kamene and Kurtz wrote about this later that they didn't realize like how different. the problem was. And so that was actually an advantage because it was an impossible problem. And they had these undergrads who also had no idea that this was an impossible problem. They were just, you know, whatever 19 and could stay up all night and work 50 hours a week and, you know, somehow not fail their classes. And they were intrinsically motivated to, you know, to figure out these technical problems. So it's actually quite amazing that they ended up checking both of those boxes, the accessible language and the time sharing to make that user experience very seamless.

I mean, even the concept of user experience is like total retro history that I just gave you, right? Like user experience was not a thing that like anybody specialized in or cared about in the area of mainframe, you know? It was like the point was the computer, not the user. Right. And that's really what, right, what's so striking. And when they're saying, like, given, I mean, it's almost a direct quote, like, given the choice between maximizing the convenience of the computer or the person, we're going to choose the person. Like, that is user experience in a nut, like, but without that language. So they absolutely had this sense of, again, also, right, possibility and like such a strong vision.

And I think Annette, what you're saying is absolutely on point that DTSS and Basic couldn't exist without each other. Like really, you needed both. And while basics sort of lived on because of note, right, Kemeni and Kurtz made it freely available. They said, if you other computer manufacturers like digital equipment corporation, other authors, like people on the NSF project, if you want to want to read about our programs and take them and use them and make them your own, we're happy to have you do that. So BASICs sort of lived many, many lives and many iterations on other computing systems and other networks. But really, I don't think BASIC could have flourished the way it did initially if it wasn't on a time sharing system like the one that they built.

Yeah, because a lot of what made the basic system and the time sharing system work so well is because so many people could access this. Like you mentioned earlier, 80% of the student body got lessons because they included it in their introductory math coursework that almost all the students took. So, you know, right away, everyone's getting exposure to basic. They're getting exposure to the time sharing concept. And, you know, as they move on, you know, from Dartmouth, they're bringing it with them. Obviously, they're giving talks about this. They're writing NSF reports. People elsewhere are picking up on them, like you mentioned.

You know, I wrote Bob Lbrecht's name in here as a big proponent of basic, an evangelist, if you will. And I think I used the word evangelist as well. But, right, it was, I mean, in Kemney and Kurtz, they were also very savvy. I think in promoting their own system, but part of the work that they did was say, hello, nearby high schools and colleges and universities, would you like to connect to our system? All you need is a teletype in a long-distance telephone line, and you too can have your students access this system. But they did. There was a network. So the Kiwit network is, you know, not just colleges and universities, but high school.

both public and private around New England that are connecting to the Dartmouth time sharing system. And then they're having programming competitions for the 12 and 13 year olds and really encouraging teachers, students, communities to sort of connect around. I mean, kids are waking up at 4 a.m. teenagers, I have a teenager. I cannot imagine my teenager waking up at 4 a.m. to get on a.m. to get on a. to program. And that's what was happening. Like there was such excitement for it. And, you know, right. So it's not just Kemeny and Kurtz and the Dartmouth students who are evangelizing basic and, like, how fun computing can be, but also educational. It's all of these students at colleges, high schools, their teachers. And word gets out. Like, I love that Minnesota has a statewide computing network that is time shared by the mid-1970s. And it all starts because a high school in Minneapolis asks to connect to the Dartmouth time sharing system. And that really sort of

creates this experiment in basic and time sharing that just keeps spreading westward. Yes. But I think, you know, what's important to note here, and Joy, you allude to this, is that this was fundamentally a university project. So like the, you know, you say Kemeni and Kurtz were savvy, and that's, of course, true, but they were also, like, deep in their bones, they were researchers. And so, you know, what you want to do as a researcher is you give away your stuff. Like, you don't necessarily make money off of it. They could have made, and they, you know, eventually they did make some money off of

basic by, you know, making commercial versions of it. But the point is that they gave it away for free initially. And they allowed DTSS, you know, to be. into by all these high schools and things like that. Now, if hit if time sharing had originated by IBM or deck or you know, any of these other players at the time like I think it would have looked different. And so I think the idea that, um, Dartmouth as a college, the board of trustees, the, you know, deans were supportive of it. They got an NSF grant. Um, you know, it's like public funding and university ethos that was driving this kind of free, uh, resource initially.

which, you know, I think is just really important to note, you know, given especially the spread to Minnesota and lots of other places. I'll say, like, yeah, the MEC network spawned out of DTSS. I feel like most people who listen to this podcast, probably a little bit aware of MEC, at least, what they morphed into over time. Go Oregon Trail. Sorry. We have callbacks to our elementary school experiences. You know, as an aside, I showed my small child, Odell Lake, the other day, from the Mech Library, and he was kind of into it. He's like, oh, yeah, I want to be the small fish and try and eat everything else and then laugh maniacally when it can't.

Amazing. Yeah, incredible. So, you know, one thing that, like you've mentioned, like, they didn't try to commercialize this, at least not at first. And one thing that really strikes me from this era of computing in general is that a lot of programs aren't copywritten under the, how we would think about it today. They're largely like open source. Like if you are on board with a given like computer ecosystem, here's our program library. You know, if you want any of it, just grab it. You know, the paradigm was what cost money was the hardware.

Yeah. So this was not a software. era. And so, you know, IBM had a share network that later happened. And, you know, that this was, again, I think it was an influence of universities initially, but even IBM got in it. And they realized, like, the software was a loss leader for their hardware. So, you know, once you could get people interested, invested, say, in IBM or whatever, you know, then they would buy IBM hardware. And at the time, too, it's, you have to also know that, like, every piece of hardware was, you know, bespoke until, you know, at least like the, you know, starting in the 1970s when they'd really

tried to design computers that would, there'd be, you know, the whole Fred Brooks mythical man months, you know, describes this whole design process of like trying to, you know, have this operating system that would go across multiple computers so that you could write one program and it would go across multiple computers, you know, but this was like all foreign at this time. And so the software, like you would have to rewrite it. it if you were, you know, having it in some other context or some other computer, right? So software was not worth much at the time. You could share it and it wasn't a big deal. Sharing hardware was a much bigger deal. So and, you know, it wasn't, I mean, this is a whole other story, but like, you know,

there were debates about copyright and patents in the 1970s. There were, you know, congressional kinds of, you know, inquiries on like, what should we do about protection of this? But it was not an issue before them. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, what I was going to say is part of why Basic became so popular is what Annette's referring to with sort of trying to create a computer system that could be not just for one company or one project.

But so, DEC came along in the late 60s manufacturing mini computers that were bought by like, or at least, I should. bought or at least by whether it was smaller companies or colleges or universities, but really deck led the way also in sort of implementing time sharing and part of their model, and I should say more widespread time sharing and more widespread computing was that they were big advocates of basic and like giving away sort of materials that had basic programs, to attract educators, to persuade maybe a school system, to get a deck or to like have colleges and universities, but also really sort of trying to walk this line of, oh, these look like fun,

but they're also educational. Like you can have your students learn, you know, how to solve math problems or figure out how to write their own code. So it was really part of what helped basic spread, ironically, was that it was kind of companies trying to sell their hardware and kind of using it as the like, oh, look at what you can do. And circulating free magazines or, you know, there's like this proliferation of magazines where it's just like, here's a bunch of programs that you, in basic, that you can, if you have access, put in to your own computer or your own, you know, timeshare system, whatever it is. And those, you know, proliferate over.

over the 70s and into the early 80s, as computers become more personal in the sense that we think where it's like one person, one computer, or like one school child, one computer, something like this. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like every time I dig through, you know, old computer files, I'm like, oh, there's a version of the Lunar Lander game, you know, Lem, there's a version of Star Trek.

And here's a version of Kemeny's football. They just got everywhere. It was everywhere. I mean, it just like there were so many different versions of it. Which like I do want to touch on like, because we mentioned that this is like a, this was a popular platform encouraged for gaming for students and, you know, other activities like communications. I like one of the anecdotes in your book, Joy, about about the person who is using it to like message his girlfriend. friend at another school. Yes, yes.

Because it was cheaper than a long distance call. Right. Yes. Absolutely. I mean, all sorts of ways. You know, the students in the high school had like a gossip column that they would regularly update. Like what's happening there? What's happening here?

So really, again, it's that sort of aspect. It's like the yik-yak of the 1960s. Yes. Is that still around? I don't think so, is it? Good riddance. I always think it was like. I don't know, before meta and like, you know, Facebook without the faces, but just this like same

idea of like, what's happening where you are. Or like, right, using them, I love this one too, like using the teletypes as giant printers to print out a like 12 foot long banner from a Dartmouth guy to his then like wife of 45 years saying like, hey girl, I miss you in foot high letters that he like rolls up in a poster to you, but, you know, that's kind of sweet, kind of awesome. Also very like sort of heteronormative in the sense of like I should back up and say, right, we are also talking about computing happening at like an all male elite school during the 1960s. So like even though it spread beyond that, it also did have its origins at a place that was historically masculine like masculine by default.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you kind of get a sense of that when you look at some of the games that formed up there. Mentioned football already. Yeah, this was Kevinney's game. And so the time sharing system goes online in 1964. He writes this in 65.

And Annette, I know you wrote quite a bit about it. I did a lot of research into this. Yeah. I mean, I guess we're like right on the, what would it be, the 60th anniversary, November 21st of 1965. And he wrote it in one day, which is remarkable, right? Like, you know, if you were to write a football game now, you probably wouldn't write it in one day. Or he would have AI write it at this point. But, you know, I mean, he was a big football fan, as a lot of people were.

And, you know, there's a whole history of sports games, too. So, like, as Joy mentioned, you know, these are on teletype. So there was no graphical interface. Like this board, no resemblance to Madden. And, you know, this was also coming from, you know, people would have still listened to football and baseball on the radio. So having a kind of play by play would have felt a little bit more normal than it does now. And sports games were really kind of people could pick them up because, you know,

like Pong is a version of tennis, tennis for two. Like there's there's all these games that, you know, you can kind of, you know, everybody knows a little bit about how tennis is played or how football is played. Like if you grow up in the United States, especially as a man in the 1960s, like you probably would know how football was played, right? So you could kind of access this game in a way or any of these other kind of sports games in a way that didn't require a lot of rules or extra, you know, manuals or tutorials. I mean, you know, like absolutely there was none of that kind of stuff. right? And so football came out of that kind of tradition or was part of that tradition of later sports games to you. Yeah. And like it wasn't even the only football game. I saw that there were two others written, including one that had a two player version. So like early network versus play. I know you mentioned in your book Salvo 42, which is like a multiplayer version of Salvo, which is a like a naval battle game. I think of it as sort of a like you sunk my battleships type of game, but yes.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, I was just going to say that's, that was like one of the funny things I still remember early in my research where like the program names would be like, you know, FT, like, but not uniform. So I was going to say like, refer to variously as like FTBL or FTBL like BL like BLL. And it was also the like, is this one game? Are there different versions?

What are we talking about? Like, you know, but anyways. And that had, you know, some to do with the constraints of the, you know, you needed, you had to have six characters. Like, that was it. So, like, you'd have to drop some things, right? So he dropped the two O's. And so it was F-T-B-A-L-L or, you know.

And so that, you know, that was just kind of one of the characteristics of it. And I think it was crucial, too, to note that, like, so football was written when, for the third version of basic, like, it was, it was not just here's basic, it's done, it's one and done, right? Like, there were different iterations of it. There was the initial basic. There was basic two, basic three, you know, et cetera. And they were iterating on it, you know, every few months. And football was written on the very first version of basic that was interactive, like, that could take input. And that is, like, that's the whole story, right? Like, you can't have a game that doesn't take input. You know, like, like imagine just a you run the program and it just runs like end it's not it's not a game that's like calculating missile trajectories um and so once you could have input in some sort of reasonable real time fashion then that opens the door for games and that is i think you know one of the reasons why football is interesting it was one of the very first batches of games that were written by users. is not an era known for a lot of computer gaming in general.

Like, if you were one of maybe three institutions, you might have a PDP computer from deck that can run space war. And that's basically it outside of a few other, like, things here and there. So, like, yeah, access to this network was pretty, I would say, influential for some of these folks. You know, there is one game, well, there's a few games on here. that I thought were interesting. A lot of these showed up in when David Aal did his 101 basic computer games book,

a lot of these show up in there, like there's a version of animal, which was from Professor Arthur Lerman. It was his sort of guessing game or the computer tried to guess what animal you're thinking of, and when it gets it wrong, it would add that animal that you were thinking of to its memory up to a certain point, so that it would just keep having better guesses. If I remember, he had like a language version of it that would inevitably, like, devolve into just a lot of curse words. But as it goes. But, like, he also came up with this, like, this ploddering, this sort of plotter printer that did not use a lot of bandwidth, the timeshare devices incorporated machine, which I'm currently writing a piece on for ROM chip.

But with that, he developed a demonstration game called Pot Shot, which was an artillery game where you have the two pillboxes on either side of this mountain. You choose the mountain. You choose the height of everything. And you just sort of fire at each other. You take turns. And it would just draw it on the plotter. And this wound up sort of becoming the progenitor of the entire like artillery genre because they made a tech trial. version for the TechTronics monitors when they started getting those in in Techronics.

Got a copy of that program. So they're using it as a demo that got spread around from there. And sure enough, by the time it gets popularized around 1978, this nine-year-old computer game, suddenly it's showing up on all sorts of platforms. So that's like a weird, like circuitous route from the Dartmouth system to like angry birds. and worms and that sort of thing. Well, I feel obliged to mention, and you may already know this, so cut me off if you do, but there's also like a through line here going back to the earliest like ENIAC,

for what we think of as like the earliest digital programmable electronic computer, which was developed basically to do ballistics calculations during World War II. So like, of course, there's this through line. from the earliest days of, and I shouldn't say of computing, but sort of what is often recognized as like if we had to pick a machine that proved the, you know, idea was possible, that one, which is really a war machine for how do we shoot better and, you know, fire our guns better through pot shot,

through angry birds, like there's the through line right there. Yes. The oldest genre. Yes. But it's also like technically easy. I mean, I'm thinking about this from my, you know, early 2000s working at this company that did first person shooters. Like the legacy of shooting is in some ways not because people like violence, right? But like because of what Joyce said, like, you know, computers came from this kind of history.

But also like hitting somebody with a projectile and having them fall over or die, like, you know, variable equals zero is like one of the easiest forms of interaction, you know? versus like subtle human, you know, relations. You look at any sort of games where they try AI. Like it's, you know, it's kind of problematic and, you know, whatever. Your buddy, like, keeps running into the wall. And, you know, like, these kinds of things are much more difficult, right? Versus, like, shoot a thing and then it's done, you know, asteroid style or whatever. Like, that's actually when you have very limited screen space or, you know, very limited hardware

and computational power, then that's an easy form of interaction. I did want to note this other game that I was reading about while I was researching this episode that uses the plotter. It's a pinball. It's a pinball simulator from pre-1972, and I cannot fathom what this would look like. Like, I've seen a video of the plotter.

I digitized a video of the... I add rounder digitize a video of this plotter and in action. And just like, it surely must just be like a mess of lines that you cannot keep track of. Surely. I just wonder what this looked like so much. So, you know, those was a lot, some of the games that came out of this system. Like, again, a lot of them were popularized through, you know, David Ales' books,

through magazines and newsletters. I know now I'm blanking. Actually, I was going to, can I jump in? Because this is on my mind. I was just, as we've been having this conversation, I was thinking about how quickly things change because you mentioned space war.

And so Stuart Brand writes this like very famous article about space war and Rolling Stone in 1972. And what I'm holding up now. Is that the original, the original computer live? Oh, my gosh. Oh, wow. I have a second edition of my office, but not at home.

Yeah. So this was this book by Ted Nelson that came out in 1994, or not in 1994, no, 1974. All about the state of computing. And you can and must understand computers now. And it's hard to explain. Everybody go look for a copy on the Internet Archive if you haven't seen it, because it's full of tiny text and illustrations. But it talks about just like the state of computing in the United States,

circa 1974. But it really addresses like all the possibility of computing for personal use, the promise, the sort of state of what it's been used for, basic, Plato, time sharing, like hobbyist computing or what is about to be. become hobbyist computing. And it's kind of like a manifesto for the 1970s in computing. But to think that this is only a decade after time sharing is really, it's like such a remarkable 10 years because we go from Kemeny and Kurtz really being like, they're

figuring out time sharing and making it work and creating writing a language. that is user-friendly and becomes vastly popular to like 10 years later, there's just this like pressing cultural sense of computing is a thing that we're going to have to contend with. Yeah. And computing started to get integrated even into education in interesting ways. Like one of the most interesting weird stories that is not well reported is there was a, there was a math program that was developed, again, out of basic, called the secondary school mathematics, curriculum, improvement study.

Yes. You know, a little niche, you know, we're going to do like spiral curriculum and new math and like all this like crazy 1960 stuff, right, about, you know, how they were like, they like messed up math education, you know. But they were integrating basic because basic was there, you know, and they were doing cool stuff. And there was in high school in New Jersey, there was, you know, basically a family of Estonian refugees who were there. And the guy, Thomas Ilvis, graduated from high school. And then later became president of Estonia after the breakup of the Soviet Union and then led

Estonia being like Estonia and, you know, led the Tiger League and like this whole movement in the 90s for, and this is like literally, this is why Estonia is still ahead and computing, especially among, you know, former Soviet countries and in Europe. But it's because of a basic computer initiative that happened in a high school in New Jersey in a young woman teacher who is, you know, experimenting with this math curriculum. It's wild. That's a domino meme. You know, like, yes. The history of the implications of this you know, what it meant to share this and like put it out there. And like, you know, as Joy is saying, like, all these like wild possibilities,

like computing could be this. It could be that. It could be whatever. And, you know, it was at a time when it wasn't locked down and it was just being integrated in all these different places. And by people, you know, too, who are not necessarily like, I don't think computing is for me, but they would take up, you know, computing because it was kind of uncharted territory. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. There's something to be said about sort of the decentralized nature of things. things and that era before, you know, the internet sort of glommed over all the other time-sharing systems and, you know, Silicon Valley sort of took over the narrative. Because, you know, the idea that you had these major, like, computing hubs in New Hampshire of all states or or Minnesota or even in Tennessee, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan, like, that's, that's very fascinating to me from a time that we're in now where you think of computing and you think about

the tech industry and it's pretty much all the West Coast or maybe Texas. So, you know, what could have been? I think I'll try. I'm going to take a picture of this and I'll send it to you, Kevin, and maybe I don't know if you can put it up with the podcast because it's such a great representation in the computer lib on page five. There's a where it's at USA. It's this like hilarious map of computing in the United States, circa in 1974. But I'm not kidding. My qualifying field advisor at MIT for the history of computing also had a copy of this book. And I was flipping through it when I was reading for my qualifying exams. And I saw this map. And I was like, what? Like, I mean, Boston area I knew because we were in Boston. But then like, just seeing like,

Dartmouth is on here, Salt Lake City is on. here, University of Illinois, Philly. I mean, sort of all of these Minnesota, all these places that we do not associate with computing anymore, but really were like, circa 1974, this is the state of the art. I was just fascinated. And that was really part of the story. When I saw Dartmouth, I was like, wait a second, what? What's happening here? So it's very much far more geographically disperse and diverse. And right, I love Annette. I love the story about Eastonia.

Like, that's amazing. And there are so many. There's so many. Like with Mac becoming this Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium and then like Stacey Horn who founded East Coast Hangout in the 1990s

as this New York City area network. We were once speaking together and I spoke first about competing in Minnesota. And she said, oh my gosh, now I know why so many of our early echo users were from Minnesota. Because like she, you know, it wouldn't have made sense otherwise to be like this state that really was

the Silicon Valley of the 1950s and 60s sent all of, you know, all of these people were like, we want another network. And she had it. So, yeah. Yeah, I was going to say like, you know, I mentioned Bob Albrecht earlier, but like he was with control data in Colorado and then in Minnesota before he moved out to San Francisco. And, you know, he was a big basic promoter. He did the people's computer company newsletter and that sort of spun off Dr. Dobbs journal.

Like that was a big introduction for a lot of people to basic was just his efforts. Yes. And, you know, just computing in general. Like, folks were everywhere. And they all kind of like picked up on what Kemeny and Kurtz and their undergrads in Dartmouth were putting down. I guess that kind of brings us to like any final thoughts on the time sharing system and where things have gone since then. I will start with you, Joy, since I know you have to leave soon. Oh boy.

To bring it right up to today, I was thinking a lot about what Kemeny and Kurtz would have to say. about AI today. And I think it's a lot like what they would have said about computing in the 60s, which is that it's up to us how we use it. And it's neither good nor bad. And in some ways, computers are really both seemingly smart and really, really dumb. And I think all of those things apply to AI as well. And so it's a lesson to just think about to like maybe not outsource everything to AI and to sort of hold on to some of like part of what was enthralling about computing was that it was another thinking tool, not a thinking substitute. So, yeah, I'm maybe putting words in their mouths, but I think that's just to like

my own little take on where things stand today. Yeah. Okay. Before you, because I know you have to go, do you want to give your, like, where can we find you or is there anything you would like to show? Oh, where can you find me? I'm at joy rankin.com. I get, if you contact me from that website, I will be the one receiving and reading your email. That's the best way to get me.

I'm working on another book right now. so I don't have exact details about a publisher yet, but keep an eye out. Yeah, but my website has all of my chapters and my book, links to my book and my essays and things. So, yeah. Okay. That's all. Thank you so much, both of you, Annette and Kevin.

Thank you. And Annette, what about you? What are your thoughts here? Well, you know, I have a lot of thoughts that I could say, but I will pick up where Joy left off and thinking about, you know, this kind of speculation about AI. You know, what, you know, I think, you know, in some ways it's dangerous, right, to speculate. Like, what would John Kemeney and Tom Kurtz say about AI? But I do know that when I talked to Tom Kurtz in 2017, I had a chance to interview him to talk about Basic, which was, you know, really just an amazing experience.

You know, John Kemeney died in the early 90s, so, you know, he's long gone. But the one thing that struck me basically reading kind of obsessively about John Kenman. Kempany and talking to Tom Kurtz was how deeply they respected their students and how much they learned from them and credited them with their work. And so if we were to sort of think about AI now, I mean, you know, one of the things I do now is I work with faculty on figuring out, you know, how we respond to AI in university classrooms. And one of the things that I'm always talking about, And I think that, you know, I don't know, maybe I'm just, as I'm talking this through, like, how inspired I am about from Kemeni and Kurtz on this is like, just listen to the students. You know, what are the students doing with this? They're doing like fascinating things with AI. It's a new technology to all of us. But when you're 19 and you are playing around with these things, like it's just like it's wide open. And that, you know, that's good and bad, right? We know that about AI. And I think, you know, retrospectively, we know that about computing generally. But at the time, you know, time, you know, their kind of optimism and their trust in students, you know, how to give them

access to these materials and just let them, just let them play, I think is, you know, maybe a good lesson for now. Hmm. Yeah. And I am not an expert on AI technologies other than generative AI being a nightmare for my personal career. I mean, all of us, it's coming for all of us, really. Oh, man. But, you know, I do find just this general sense of, like, you know, anyone can do programming. Anyone can make a computer do the kind of things they want to. Like, I think that's a really fascinating, like, consideration, especially with computer games,

I think, bring it back to gaming. Because a lot of games nowadays are very, they're very large teams. They're a big production. They're a big effort. But on the other hand, you have this, like, kind of indie movement, right? Exactly. You know, like the distribution is much easier now. You've got Steam.

There's, you know, a lot of other contexts in which people can program with small teams. And, you know, this is where you see some innovation happening with games, too. Exactly. You know, the ethos still exists. It's just, it's a little messier now. it's a little easier to get buried under the sheer number of programs, but it's still there. And, you know, it's, I think it's still fun to mess around with basic, you know, putting in some typeins. I think it's really interesting people programming stuff.

I have friends who are like making stuff in Pico 8 and whatnot lately. So, oh, I think there's still that sort of through line from the 60s and in Dartmouth to right now. I think that's true. And, you know, there was, I think that there's other programming languages that have been, you know, inspired by Basic 2, of course. You know, I think about like, for instance, Ruby. And, you know, there was a character in the programming, a world, gosh, circa 2005 to 7 or so, who went by the name Why the Lucky Stiff. And he was, I mean, actually like a really kind of almost like a renegade from the 60s kind of computing person. and I just greatly admired him for that.

But he had a kind of whole thing about like, why is it? You know, we have HTML, we have CSS, we have JavaScript. You know, he's like, people think that computing is so much easier. But it actually, like, what happened, you know, when you booted up your Commodore 64 or your Apple 2E, it just booted right into basic. And like, that was it, you know. And so you didn't need a manual. You didn't need to download this thing.

You know, it just was it. And so, and that was your primary interface. And I think, and he, he, kind of lamented that shift and, you know, kept trying to take Ruby back to that, that era. And I think a lot of people have tried to go back to that era. Like, what would it look like if programming were the interface that was the default for a computer, you know, versus like the graphical interface or, you know, now even AI interface, you know, which is like almost a, it's a semantic interface. I think we're, you know,

we're heading that direction. And what do we lose in that? I think is, you know, an important question. All right. Well, I think that's a good note to go out on. So this has been another episode of Retronauts, a Patreon-supported podcast. You can find us at patreon.com slash Retronauts as well as our website, Retronauts.com. If you support us at our $3 tier, you get the episodes a week early and ad-free. $5 a month gets you that, plus two full-length Patreon-exclusive episodes on Fridays. Plus, you have access to our Discord, Diamond Fight's weekly Sunday. columns. We also offer a Nintendo $64 tier, which lets you choose the topic of retronauts every six

months. But spots are limited, so I would check first to see if that's even available at this point. And Annette, where can folks find you? So I'm at University of Pittsburgh. It's easy to find me, Annette V-E at University of Pittsburgh. And I have, I write for substack. I write mostly about AI at this point. I am interested in gaming, but like my whole family is gamers and I came from, you know, this game industry. But, but now I spend a lot of time thinking about AI. I'm writing a history of automated writing where I'm talking about 18th century Android's and spirit writing and like a real long history of AI. But I'm also working on a guide with W.W. Norton, the publisher, on AI aware teaching. And I run a lot.

of workshops on on AI. And I think about, you know, conceptual questions of programming and interfaces and AI, especially through, through writing. And as for myself, you can find me here. You can find me on Atariarchive.org, which is my website and my Blue Sky account. I'm on YouTube under Atari Archive, and I have a book out also under said name. So if you are interested in early gaming history, especially through the lens of the Atari 2600, that's the ideal book for you, I think. All right, and with that, thank you all for listening.

Thank you. And the man is going to be on the way to do on any kids, they go with the harm to kick a thing.