BASIC: The First User-Friendly Computer Programming Language
Hanover, Grafton County, New Hampshire
Marker Inscription
In 1964, Dartmouth College math professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz created one of the first user-friendly computer programming languages, called Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. BASIC made computer programming accessible to college…… transcription continues on the marker
This transcription may be incomplete
Our source stores marker text in a field capped at 255 characters, and this inscription appears to have been cut off. We won’t guess at the missing words — the inscription is the primary source, and inventing it would be worse than leaving it short.
Have you stood in front of this marker? Send us the full text or a photo of the sign and we’ll complete the record.
The Story
In 1964, Dartmouth mathematicians John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz set out to make computing something ordinary students could do, not just specialists. Their language, BASIC — Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code — used plain, English-like commands and ran on Dartmouth's pioneering time-sharing system, letting many users share one computer at once. As inexpensive personal computers spread in the 1970s and 1980s, BASIC became the language millions of people first learned to program in.
Why it matters
BASIC helped turn computing from a specialist's craft into a popular skill, seeding the personal-computer revolution and the idea that anyone could tell a machine what to do.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1964, the computer was still a rare and forbidding machine. Computers filled whole rooms, cost fortunes, and answered only to specialists who fed them instructions in cryptic codes. For an ordinary college student, actually using one was nearly unthinkable — the machine sat behind a wall of expertise.
Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, became an unlikely frontier for changing that. This was the height of the postwar era, when American universities were pushing the boundaries of a new science of computing, and a pair of Dartmouth mathematicians decided the barrier between people and machines was a problem worth solving.
Their insight was radical for its time: computing should not be reserved for engineers and mathematicians. An undergraduate studying history or French should be able to sit down and make a computer do something useful. That democratic idea — computing for everyone — is the seed from which this whole story grows.
People & events
The two men at the center of it were John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, mathematics professors at Dartmouth. In 1964 they created a programming language they called BASIC — Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code — built from plain, English-like commands that a newcomer could actually read and understand.
BASIC did not work in isolation. It ran on Dartmouth's pioneering time-sharing system, an arrangement that let many people use a single computer at the same time, each at their own terminal. Together, the friendly language and the shared machine meant that dozens of students could learn to program at once, without ever touching the intimidating hardware directly.
Kemeny and Kurtz were not just building a tool; they were making a statement about who computing was for. By designing a language explicitly for beginners, they treated ordinary students not as an afterthought but as the whole point. The name itself — Beginner's All-purpose — announces the mission.
Its place in the American story
What began as a teaching tool for undergraduates escaped the campus and helped change the world. As inexpensive personal computers spread into homes and schools in the 1970s and 1980s, BASIC came along with them, and for millions of people it became the very first language they ever learned to program in.
That matters enormously to the American story of technology. The personal-computer revolution depended not only on cheaper hardware but on the belief that regular people could command these machines — and BASIC, more than any other language, carried that belief into ordinary hands. A generation of tinkerers, hobbyists, and future engineers got their start typing simple BASIC commands.
In a country that has often defined itself by widening access — to land, to education, to opportunity — BASIC belongs to that tradition. It helped turn computing from a specialist's craft into a popular skill, and planted the idea that anyone, given a friendly enough tool, could tell a machine what to do.
If you visit
Hanover is a classic New England college town, and Dartmouth's campus is a pleasure to walk — leafy, historic, and easy to explore on foot. This memorial to an idea sits in a place where big ideas have long been the local industry, and that context is half the fun.
Think about the strangeness of what you're standing near: a marker not to a battle or a founder, but to a language — a way of talking to machines that was invented right here. It's a reminder that some of history's turning points are quiet ones, worked out by professors trying to help their students.
If you're of a certain age, this stop may hit you personally; many visitors remember typing their own first lines of BASIC on a home computer decades ago. Let that memory land. Then, as you wander the rest of Hanover and the Dartmouth grounds, carry the thought that the everyday, anyone-can-do-it spirit of modern computing traces part of its lineage to this very campus.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · John Kemeny
- · Thomas Kurtz
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Pest House
Lebanon, NH
The cellar hole here marks the site of a 1790s "pest house," a building set apart to inoculate and isolate people during smallpox outbreaks. In the years before vaccination became widespread, New England towns commonly built such houses on their outskirts to contain the deadly, contagious disease. Little remains today but the foundation and the memory kept alive by local historians.
Noyes Academy Historical Marker
Canaan, NH
In the years before the Civil War, the small town of Canaan, New Hampshire, briefly hosted one of the boldest educational experiments in the country. Chartered in 1834 and opened in 1835, Noyes Academy welcomed Black and white students together at a time when higher learning was almost universally closed to African Americans. The experiment was short-lived: within months, a mob of enraged neighbors hitched teams of oxen to the schoolhouse and hauled the building off its foundation, dragging it away to shut the academy down. Some of the young Black scholars who had traveled from across the Northeast to study there went on to become leading voices in the abolition movement.
Cannon Mountain Aerial Tramway Cabin
Lincoln, NH
This tramcar once climbed Cannon Mountain in New Hampshire's Franconia Notch as part of the first passenger-carrying aerial tramway in North America, opened in 1938. Loaded, it lifted more than two dozen riders to the summit in about nine minutes, opening the high country to sightseers and skiers in a way no road or trail could. This car did the work for more than four decades before being retired and preserved.
Radeke Cabin
Albany, NH
This rustic cabin in the woods of Albany, New Hampshire, was built by Eliza Greene Radeke, a Rhode Island arts patron who served as president of the Rhode Island School of Design in the early twentieth century. RISD, founded in 1877 in Providence, grew into one of America's most influential art and design schools, and Radeke was among the women whose leadership and philanthropy shaped its early growth. A cabin like this one, in the White Mountains region, reflects the era's fashion among cultured New Englanders for simple retreats amid nature.