Episode 744: Dartmouth Time Sharing System and the Birth of BASIC (Patreon)

Kevin: In between the untouchable mainframe computers of the 1950s / early ’60s and the home computer revolution of the late 1970s, there were time sharing networks. Pioneered by the Ivy League school Dartmouth College, its Dartmouth Time Sharing System (or DTSS) and its companion programming language BASIC, time sharing networks provided computer to the common man. At last, people besides the high priests and priestesses were allowed to operate hulking behemoths in military installations and university labs; now regular students at universities and high schools could too. With access to a teletype—effectively a typewriter linked to the computer that could also print its responses—users didn’t need to worry about punch cards and lengthy waits to get their results.

The DTSS allowed hundreds of simultaneous users to access computers for educational projects, certainly, but also more whimsical uses were encouraged – notably gaming. And with the spread of the DTSS network as far west as Minnesota and the BASIC computer language well beyond that, those early game and demo programs became the backbone of computer gaming for decades, even networked multiplayer contests. And to explain how cool and revolutionary this concept was, I was joined for this podcast by DTSS experts Dr. Joy Lisi Rankin, author of A People’s History of Computing in the United States, and Annette Vee, who wrote a fabulous article about John Kemeny’s 1965 computer game FTBALL. If you’ve typed in programs from David Ahl’s BASIC Computer Games at some point in the past 50-odd years, chances are at least one of those came from Dartmouth… and if you enjoyed games like Angry Birds or Worms, their history stretches right back to Hanover, New Hampshire as well.

As an aside, if you enjoyed this, I recommend heading back into our archives and pulling up Jeremy Parish’s episode with Robert Woodhead about Wizardry and the PLATO network, another timesharing system based out of Illinois that was similarly revolutionary.

The book described (and shown) during the call by Dr. Rankin is Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib, and can be found on Archive.org if you want to follow along. The map on page 5 shows what computer networks looked like in 1974 and is quite a sight to see compared to today!

Art by Amanda Neipris; edits by Greg Leahy

08:23 - The Dartmouth College Band: "As the Backs Go Tearing By"

16:33 - The Supremes: "Where Did Our Love Go" | Dr. Strangelove: Opening Titles

28:11 - Bob Dylan: "The Times They Are a-Changin'"

42:41 - A Fistful of Dollars: L'inseguimento

53:49 - Sam Spence: "Yesterday's Heroes"

59:38 - Electric Light Orchestra: "Eldorado Overture"

1:08:18 - Big Brother & The Holding Company, Janis Joplin: "Flower in the Sun"

Closing - The Dartmouth College Band: "As the Backs Go Tearing By" (cont.)