BASIC programming language

The invention: An interactive computer system and simple pro-gramming language that made it easier for nontechnical people to use computers.

The people behind the invention:

John G. Kemeny (1926-1992), the chairman of Dartmouth’s mathematics department

Thomas E. Kurtz (1928- ), the director of the Kiewit Computation Center at Dartmouth

Bill Gates (1955- ), a cofounder and later chairman of the board and chief operating officer of the Microsoft

Corporation

The Evolution of Programming

The first digital computers were developed during World War II (1939-1945) to speed the complex calculations required for ballistics, cryptography, and other military applications. Computer technol-ogy developed rapidly, and the 1950’s and 1960’s saw computer sys-tems installed throughout the world. These syssys-tems were very large and expensive, requiring many highly trained people for their oper-ation.

The calculations performed by the first computers were deter-mined solely by their electrical circuits. In the 1940’s, The American mathematician John von Neumann and others pioneered the idea of computers storing their instructions in a program, so that changes in calculations could be made without rewiring their circuits. The programs were written in machine language, long lists of zeros and ones corresponding to on and off conditions of circuits. During the 1950’s, “assemblers” were introduced that used short names for common sequences of instructions and were, in turn, transformed into the zeros and ones intelligible to the computer. The late 1950’s saw the introduction of high-level languages, notably Formula Trans-lation (FORTRAN), Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL), and Algorithmic Language (ALGOL), which used English words to 92

communicate instructions to the computer. Unfortunately, these high-level languages were complicated; they required some knowl-edge of the computer equipment and were designed to be used by scientists, engineers, and other technical experts.

Developing BASIC

John G. Kemeny was chairman of the department of mathemat-ics at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. In 1962, Thomas E. Kurtz, Dartmouth’s computing director, approached Kemeny with the idea of implementing a computer system at Dart-mouth College. Both men were dedicated to the idea that liberal arts students should be able to make use of computers. Although the En-glish commands of FORTRAN and ALGOL were a tremendous im-provement over the cryptic instructions of assembly language, they were both too complicated for beginners. Kemeny convinced Kurtz that they needed a completely new language, simple enough for be-ginners to learn quickly, yet flexible enough for many different kinds of applications.

The language they developed was known as the “Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code,” or BASIC. The original lan-guage consisted of fourteen different statements. Each line of a BASIC program was preceded by a number. Line numbers were ref-erenced by control flow statements, such as, “IF X = 9 THEN GOTO 200.” Line numbers were also used as an editing reference. If line 30 of a program contained an error, the programmer could make the necessary correction merely by retyping line 30.

Programming in BASIC was first taught at Dartmouth in the fall of 1964. Students were ready to begin writing programs after two hours of classroom lectures. By June of 1968, more than 80 percent of the undergraduates at Dartmouth could write a BASIC program.

Most of them were not science majors and used their programs in conjunction with other nontechnical courses.

Kemeny and Kurtz, and later others under their supervision, wrote more powerful versions of BASIC that included support for graphics on video terminals and structured programming. The cre-ators of BASIC, however, always tried to maintain their original de-sign goal of keeping BASIC simple enough for beginners.

BASIC programming language / 93

Consequences

Kemeny and Kurtz encouraged the widespread adoption of BA-SIC by allowing other institutions to use their computer system and by placing BASIC in the public domain. Over time, they shaped BA-SIC into a powerful language with numerous features added in re-sponse to the needs of its users. What Kemeny and Kurtz had not foreseen was the advent of the microprocessor chip in the early 1970’s, which revolutionized computer technology. By 1975, micro-computer kits were being sold to hobbyists for well under a thou-sand dollars. The earliest of these was the Altair.

That same year, prelaw student William H. Gates (1955- ) was persuaded by a friend, Paul Allen, to drop out of Harvard Univer-sity and help create a version of BASIC that would run on the Altair.

Gates and Allen formed a company, Microsoft Corporation, to sell their BASIC interpreter, which was designed to fit into the tiny memory of the Altair. It was about as simple as the original Dart-mouth BASIC but had to depend heavily on the computer hard-ware. Most computers purchased for home use still include a ver-sion of Microsoft Corporation’s BASIC.

See also BINAC computer; COBOL computer language; FOR-TRAN programming language; SAINT; Supercomputer.

Bathyscaphe

The invention: A submersible vessel capable of exploring the deepest trenches of the world’s oceans.

The people behind the invention:

William Beebe (1877-1962), an American biologist and explorer Auguste Piccard (1884-1962), a Swiss-born Belgian physicist Jacques Piccard (1922- ), a Swiss ocean engineer

Early Exploration of the Deep Sea

The first human penetration of the deep ocean was made by Wil-liam Beebe in 1934, when he descended 923 meters into the Atlantic Ocean near Bermuda. His diving chamber was a 1.5-meter steel ball that he named Bathysphere, from the Greek word bathys (deep) and the word sphere, for its shape. He found that a sphere resists pres-sure in all directions equally and is not easily crushed if it is con-structed of thick steel. The bathysphere weighed 2.5 metric tons. It had no buoyancy and was lowered from a surface ship on a sin-gle 2.2-centimeter cable; a broken cable would have meant certain death for the bathysphere’s passengers.

Numerous deep dives by Beebe and his engineer colleague, Otis Barton, were the first uses of submersibles for science. Through two small viewing ports, they were able to observe and photograph many deep-sea creatures in their natural habitats for the first time.

They also made valuable observations on the behavior of light as the submersible descended, noting that the green surface water be-came pale blue at 100 meters, dark blue at 200 meters, and nearly black at 300 meters. A technique called “contour diving” was par-ticularly dangerous. In this practice, the bathysphere was slowly towed close to the seafloor. On one such dive, the bathysphere nar-rowly missed crashing into a coral crag, but the explorers learned a great deal about the submarine geology of Bermuda and the biology of a coral-reef community. Beebe wrote several popular and scien-tific books about his adventures that did much to arouse interest in the ocean.

Testing the Bathyscaphe

The next important phase in the exploration of the deep ocean was led by the Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard. In 1948, he launched a new type of deep-sea research craft that did not require a cable and that could return to the surface by means of its own buoyancy. He called the craft a bathyscaphe, which is Greek for “deep boat.”

Piccard began work on the bathyscaphe in 1937, supported by a grant from the Belgian National Scientific Research Fund. The Ger-man occupation of Belgium early in World War II cut the project short, but Piccard continued his work after the war. The finished bathyscaphe was named FNRS 2, for the initials of the Belgian fund that had sponsored the project. The vessel was ready for testing in the fall of 1948.

The first bathyscaphe, as well as later versions, consisted of two basic components: first, a heavy steel cabin to accommodate observers, which looked somewhat like an enlarged version of Beebe’s bathysphere; and second, a light container called a float, filled with gasoline, that provided lifting power because it was lighter than water. Enough iron shot was stored in silos to cause the vessel to descend. When this ballast was released, the gasoline in the float gave the bathyscaphe sufficient buoyancy to return to the surface.

Piccard’s bathyscaphe had a number of ingenious devices. Jacques-Yves Cousteau, inventor of the Aqualung six years earlier, contrib-uted a mechanical claw that was used to take samples of rocks, sedi-ment, and bottom creatures. A seven-barreled harpoon gun, oper-ated by water pressure, was attached to the sphere to capture specimens of giant squids or other large marine animals for study.

The harpoons had electrical-shock heads to stun the “sea monsters,”

and if that did not work, the harpoon could give a lethal injection of strychnine poison. Inside the sphere were various instruments for measuring the deep-sea environment, including a Geiger counter for monitoring cosmic rays. The air-purification system could sup-port two people for up to twenty-four hours. The bathyscaphe had a radar mast to broadcast its location as soon as it surfaced. This was essential because there was no way for the crew to open the sphere from the inside.

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The FNRS 2 was first tested off the Cape Verde Islands with the assistance of the French navy. Although Piccard descended to only 25 meters, the dive demonstrated the potential of the bathyscaphe.

On the second dive, the vessel was severely damaged by waves, and further tests were suspended. A redesigned and rebuilt bathyscaphe, renamed FNRS 3 and operated by the French navy, descended to a depth of 4,049 meters off Dakar, Senegal, on the west coast of Africa in early 1954.

In August, 1953, Auguste Piccard, with his son Jacques, launched a Bathyscaphe / 97

Auguste Piccard

Auguste Piccard used balloons to set records in altitude both above sea level and below sea level. However, setting records was not his purpose: He went where no one had gone before for the sake of science.

Born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1884, Auguste and his twin brother, Jean-Félix Piccard, studied in Zu-rich. After university in 1913, Auguste, a physicist, and Jean-Félix, a chemist, took up hot-air ballooning, and they joined the balloon section of the Swiss Army in 1915.

Auguste moved to Brussels, Belgium, in 1922 to take a professorship of applied physics, and there he continued his ballooning. His subject of interest was

cosmic rays, and in order to study them he had to get above the thick lower layer of atmosphere. Accordingly, he designed hy-drogen-filled balloons that could reach high altitude. A ball-shaped, pressurized gondola carried him, his instruments, and one colleague to 51,775 feet altitude in 1931 and to 53,152 feet in 1932. Both were records.

Auguste, working with his son Jacques, then turned his atten-tion to the sea. In order to explore the largely unknown world underwater, he built the bathyscaphe. It was really just another type of balloon, one which was made of steel and carried him inside. His dives with his son in various models of bathyscaphe set record after record. Their 1953 dive down 10,300 feet into the Mediterranean Sea was the deepest until Jacques, accompanied by a U.S. Navy officer, descended to the deepest spot on Earth seven years later.

(LibraryofCongress)

greatly improved bathyscaphe, the Trieste, which they named for the Italian city in which it was built. In September of the same year, the Trieste successfully dived to 3,150 meters in the Mediterranean Sea. The Piccards glimpsed, for the first time, animals living on the seafloor at that depth. In 1958, the U.S. Navy purchased the Trieste and trans-ported it to California, where it was equipped with a new cabin de-signed to enable the vessel to reach the seabed of the great oceanic trenches. Several successful descents were made in the Pacific by Jacques Piccard, and on January 23, 1960, Piccard, accompanied by Lieutenant Donald Walsh of the U.S. Navy, dived a record 10,916 me-ters to the bottom of the Mariana Trench near the island of Guam.

Impact

The oceans have always raised formidable barriers to humanity’s curiosity and understanding. In 1960, two events demonstrated the ability of humans to travel underwater for prolonged periods and to observe the extreme depths of the ocean. The nuclear submarine Triton circumnavigated the world while submerged, and Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Donald Walsh descended nearly 11 kilo-meters to the bottom of the ocean’s greatest depression aboard the Trieste. After sinking for four hours and forty-eight minutes, the Trieste landed in the Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench, the deepest known spot on the ocean floor. The explorers remained on the bottom for only twenty minutes, but they answered one of the biggest questions about the sea: Can animals live in the immense cold and pressure of the deep trenches? Observations of red shrimp and flatfishes proved that the answer was yes.

The Trieste played another important role in undersea explora-tion when, in 1963, it located and photographed the wreckage of the nuclear submarine Thresher. The Thresher had mysteriously disap-peared on a test dive off the New England coast, and the Navy had been unable to find a trace of the lost submarine using surface ves-sels equipped with sonar and remote-control cameras on cables.

Only the Trieste could actually search the bottom. On its third dive, the bathyscaphe found a piece of the wreckage, and it eventually photographed a 3,000-meter trail of debris that led to Thresher‘s hull, at a depth of 2.5 kilometers.

98 / Bathyscaphe

These exploits showed clearly that scientific submersibles could be used anywhere in the ocean. Piccard’s work thus opened the last geographic frontier on Earth.

See also Aqualung; Bathysphere; Sonar; Ultrasound.

Bathysphere

The invention:The first successful chamber for manned deep-sea diving missions.

The people behind the invention:

William Beebe (1877-1962), an American naturalist and curator of ornithology

Otis Barton (1899- ), an American engineer

John Tee-Van (1897-1967), an American general associate with the New York Zoological Society

Gloria Hollister Anable (1903?-1988), an American research associate with the New York Zoological Society

Inner Space

Until the 1930’s, the vast depths of the oceans had remained largely unexplored, although people did know something of the ocean’s depths. Soundings and nettings of the ocean bottom had been made many times by a number of expeditions since the 1870’s.

Diving helmets had allowed humans to descend more than 91 me-ters below the surface, and the submarine allowed them to reach a depth of nearly 120 meters. There was no firsthand knowledge, however, of what it was like in the deepest reaches of the ocean: in-ner space.

The person who gave the world the first account of life at great depths was William Beebe. When he announced in 1926 that he was attempting to build a craft to explore the ocean, he was already a well-known naturalist. Although his only degrees had been honor-ary doctorates, he was graduated as a special student in the Depart-ment of Zoology of Columbia University in 1898. He began his life-long association with the New York Zoological Society in 1899.

It was during a trip to the Galápagos Islands off the west coast of South America that Beebe turned his attention to oceanography. He became the first scientist to use a diving helmet in fieldwork, swim-ming in the shallow waters. He continued this shallow-water work at the new station he established in 1928, with the permission of En-100

glish authorities, on the tiny island of Nonesuch in the Bermudas.

Beebe realized, however, that he had reached the limits of the cur-rent technology and that to study the animal life of the ocean depths would require a new approach.

A New Approach

While he was considering various cylindrical designs for a new deep-sea exploratory craft, Beebe was introduced to Otis Barton.

Barton, a young New Englander who had been trained as an engi-neer at Harvard University, had turned to the problems of ocean diving while doing postgraduate work at Columbia University. In December, 1928, Barton brought his blueprints to Beebe. Beebe im-mediately saw that Barton’s design was what he was looking for, and the two went ahead with the construction of Barton’s craft.

The “bathysphere,” as Beebe named the device, weighed 2,268 kilograms and had a diameter of 1.45 meters and steel walls 3.8 cen-timeters thick. The door, weighing 180 kilograms, would be fas-tened over a manhole with ten bolts. Four windows, made of fused quartz, were ordered from the General Electric Company at a cost of

$500 each. A 250-watt water spotlight lent by the Westinghouse Company provided the exterior illumination, and a telephone lent by the Bell Telephone Laboratory provided a means of communicat-ing with the surface. The breathcommunicat-ing apparatus consisted of two oxy-gen tanks that allowed 2 liters of oxyoxy-gen per minute to escape into the sphere. During the dive, the carbon dioxide and moisture were removed, respectively, by trays containing soda lime and calcium chloride. A winch would lower the bathysphere on a steel cable.

In early July, 1930, after several test dives, the first manned dive commenced. Beebe and Barton descended to a depth of 244 meters.

A short circuit in one of the switches showered them with sparks momentarily, but the descent was largely a success. Beebe and Barton had descended farther than any human.

Two more days of diving yielded a final dive record of 435 meters below sea level. Beebe and the other members of his staff (ichthyolo-gist John Tee-Van and zoolo(ichthyolo-gist Gloria Hollister Anable) saw many species of fish and other marine life that previously had been seen only after being caught in nets. These first dives proved that an un-Bathysphere / 101

dersea exploratory craft had potential value, at least for deep water.

After 1932, the bathysphere went on display at the Century of Prog-ress Exhibition in Chicago.

In late 1933, the National Geographic Society offered to sponsor another series of dives. Although a new record was not a stipula-tion, Beebe was determined to supply one. The bathysphere was completely refitted before the new dives.

An unmanned test dive to 920 meters was made on August 7, 1934, once again off Nonesuch Island. Minor adjustments were made, and on the morning of August 11, the first dive commenced, attaining a depth of 765 meters and recording a number of new sci-entific observations. Several days later, on August 15, the weather was again right for the dive.

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