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What is Atari BASIC?

April 26, 2017Atari BASIC

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What is Atari BASIC?

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BASIC is an acronym for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Developed by John Kemeney and Thomas Kurtz in the mid 1960s at Dartmouth College, BASIC is one of the earliest and simplest high-level programming languages, incorporating components of FORTRAN and ALGOL. In 1978 Atari contracted with Shepardson Microsystems, Inc (SMI) to create a version of BASIC for their upcoming home computers. The following worked together on the project, which resulted in Atari BASIC: Paul Laughton (author of Apple DOS) – project leader, co-primary contributor Kathleen O’Brien – co-primary contributor Bill Wilkinson – floating point scheme design Paul Krasno – implemented the math library routines following guidelines supplied by Fred Ruckdeschel (author of the acclaimed text, BASIC Scientific Subroutines) Bob Shepardson – Modified IMP-16 Assembler to accept special syntax tables Paul invented Mike Peters – keypuncher/computer operator/junior programmer/troubleshooter Three Revisions of Ata