Okay, fine. I first used a computer in fall of 1968. And took 2 computer courses during college. And still know nothing about them. Ha. Yes, AI doesn't do some of the things you mentioned in your 2 posts, but neither does any technology, including computers and cell phones.
What next big thing technologies, like really big things, didn't pan out?
I'm totally convinced that AI is incredibly huge and useful, even if it can't or won't do everything some people say. It's truly amazing for the smaller things I use it for. Like researching, summarizing and writing. It's incredibly useful in many legal things. It even comes up with some legal ideas that had never occurred to me. It's far more accurate than virtually anything else, even though it is far from perfect. And it is incredibly fast. I don't use it for things like who's the best football team or anything like that, or anything that is an opinion. At this point, those uses would be silly.
"When were computers first used at dartmouth
The introduction of computing at Dartmouth unfolded in a few distinct, history-making milestones:
1. The Pre-Electronic Milestone (1940)
The very first intersection of Dartmouth and digital computing occurred in
September 1940 in McNutt Hall. Research mathematician George Stibitz (working with Bell Telephone Laboratories) used a standard telephone line and a teletype console on campus to remotely access an automatic calculator mainframe in New York City. This was the world's first demonstration of
remote access computing.
The Koppelman Group+ 1
2.
Dartmouth acquired its first physical, on-campus computer in
1959—a rudimentary, desk-sized
LGP-30. It was a magnetic-drum memory machine that gave a small group of undergraduate students and faculty their very first hands-on programming experience.
Wikipedia+ 1
3. The Digital Revolution (1964)
Dartmouth
The watershed year for Dartmouth computing was
1964. Professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz [I took courses, some math, from both of them]—believing that exposure to computing was as essential to a liberal arts education as using the library—secured a National Science Foundation grant to bring a massive
General Electric GE-225 mainframe to campus.
Dartmouth
Working with a team of brilliant undergraduate "sysprogs" (systems programmers) in the basement of College Hall (now Collis), they created the
Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS) and the
BASIC programming language. At 4:00 AM on
May 1, 1964, the system successfully ran its first simultaneous programs, effectively inventing accessible, personal computing and democratizing technology for students of all disciplines.
Dartmouth"
Gemini.
Basic from Dartmouth was what Gates used to build Microsoft.
"
In fact, BASIC is the literal foundation upon which Microsoft was built.
The evolution from Dartmouth BASIC to the software empire we know today is one of the most famous straight lines in tech history. Here is how it happened:
The Missing Link: Altair BASIC (1975)
In January 1975, the MITS Altair 8800 appeared on the cover of
Popular Electronics, sparking the microcomputer revolution. However, the machine shipped without software or an accessible operating system.
Seeing an opportunity,
Bill Gates and Paul Allen realized that if they could adapt the easy-to-use BASIC language to run on the Altair's tiny Intel 8080 microprocessor, they would have a viable commercial product. Working around the clock at Harvard, they wrote an interpreter.
When they successfully loaded their code into the Altair via paper tape, it worked perfectly. That interpreter,
Altair BASIC, became the very first product of a brand-new company they initially called "Micro-Soft."
The Separation from Dartmouth's Vision
While Gates and Allen used the core syntax, logic, and user-friendly spirit of Dartmouth BASIC, their commercial versions began to diverge structurally:
- The Business Model: Professors Kemeny and Kurtz intentionally kept Dartmouth BASIC in the public domain, wanting it to be a free educational tool for the world. Gates took the opposite approach, famously writing an "Open Letter to Hobbyists" in 1976, demanding that software developers be paid for their intellectual property.
- Technical Adapation: Microsoft had to strip down Dartmouth's version to fit into incredibly tight memory constraints (initially just 4 KB of RAM).
The Evolution into Windows (GW-BASIC & Visual Basic)
Microsoft didn't just use BASIC to get started; they rode it for decades. As personal computers grew, Microsoft evolved the language through several massive iterations:
- MBASIC & IBM BASIC (Late 1970s/1980s): Microsoft licensed versions of BASIC to nearly every early computer manufacturer, including Apple, Commodore, and eventually IBM for the original IBM PC.
- GW-BASIC & QBasic (1980s/1990s): This became bundled directly with MS-DOS. For a generation of Gen-X and Millennial programmers, this was their introduction to coding.
- Visual Basic (1991): This was a massive paradigm shift. Microsoft transformed BASIC into a drag-and-drop, graphical user interface (GUI) tool. It allowed developers to rapidly build full-fledged Windows applications visually, handling the backend code automatically.
- VB.NET (2002–Present): Microsoft fully integrated the language into their modern object-oriented .NETframework, ensuring it lived on into the enterprise software era.
Without Kemeny and Kurtz's breakthrough in Hanover, the software landscape—and Microsoft itself—would have looked entirely different." Gemini.
