Technology History | College Hall, Dartmouth — Four in the Morning, and No One Agrees Who Was There

Dartmouth's own library says nobody is certain who was in the room.

The version told everywhere, including on the college's fiftieth-anniversary pages, is that at four in the morning on 1 May 1964, in the basement of College Hall, Professor John Kemeny and a student programmer typed RUN on neighbouring terminals, both got correct answers back, and time-sharing and BASIC arrived together.

Rauner Library, Dartmouth's own special collections, tells it differently: a group of students ran the first program, and neither Kemeny nor Thomas Kurtz remembered being there.

The college's obituary for Kurtz hedges the same way, calling the scene Dartmouth legend and crediting student programmers.

The date and the hour survive every version. The cast does not.

What is not in doubt is what they were trying to do.

Kemeny and Kurtz wanted undergraduates who were not scientists to use a computer directly, which in 1964 meant solving two problems at once.

John McCarthy had suggested time-sharing to Kurtz, so that one machine could serve many people from many terminals rather than swallowing decks of cards at a counter.

The language had to be learnable in an afternoon, and the pair had already failed at it twice, with Darsimco and then DOPE.

BASIC was the third attempt, and the first release had fourteen statements.

Kemeny applied to the National Science Foundation in 1963 for the money to buy a General Electric machine and build a general-purpose time-sharing system, and the grant referees doubted a plan that depended on undergraduates doing the work.

The undergraduates did the work.

Michael Busch and John McGeachie led the systems programming, and students went on running the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System for decades.

It opened to general users that June, and by the autumn hundreds of students were using twenty terminals around campus.

Kemeny wrote later that they had imagined millions of people writing their own programs, which is roughly what happened once home computers arrived carrying BASIC in read-only memory.

College Hall is now the Collis Center, the college's student centre, and the basement that held the terminals is part of an ordinary undergraduate building people walk through for coffee.

Photo: the Collis Center from the green. The building is the one in the story; the interior has been rebuilt several times since 1964.

Sources: Dartmouth College's BASIC at 50 project, Rauner Library's Sharing the Computer exhibit, and the college's 2024 remembrance of Thomas Kurtz; TIME's fiftieth-anniversary history.

Photo: Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.