Introduction
Hanover, NH. September, 1965. Dartmouth’s incoming freshmen were told to go to an hour-long lecture by Professor John G. Kemeny. Being incoming freshmen, we went. Along with Kurtz, Kemeny had designed a new computer language called BASIC. It was supposed to be much easier to learn than existing languages. In an hour Kemeny taught us how to use most of it. (And he made us laugh a lot, too. He was a great teacher.)
I was lucky to be there then. Kemeny told us to go write a program to compute the value of pi. Using Dartmouth’s new, time-sharing computer system and a teletype terminal (which punched your program into paper tape in lieu of disk storage), I actually got pi to two decimal places. My career as a mathematician (the reason ...
Get JavaScript Object Programming now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
