An eBay relic of a dead programming language

Quick. What was the first personal computer?

• The IBM PC, introduced in 1981.
• The Apple I, introduced in 1976.
• The Altair 8800, introduced in 1975.

In my opinion, the correct answer is none of the above machines. Instead, I pick the Librascope LGP-30, introduced in 1956. It’s a tube computer! But it has all the attributes of a personal computer. It has integrated user I/O (a teletypewriter), a built in hard drive (magnetic drum!), external mass storage (paper tape!), and you could program it in a high level language. It was designed by a relatively unknown computer whiz named Stanley Frankel, who had been Robert Oppenheimer’s grad student, had run the computing shop in Los Alamos during the Manhattan project, and had been the first serious programmer for ENIAC.

Back to Frankel’s LGP-30. The machine became very popular with universities because of its low cost and high function. Dartmouth College got one in 1959. Two professors at Dartmouth named John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz started developing simple programming languages using the LGP-30. These simple languages were intended to open the world of programming to more people.

Kemeny and Kurtz developed several simplified programming languages on the LGP-30 including DARSIMCO (Dartmouth Simplified Code), DART, ALGOL 30, SCALP (Self-Contained ALGOL Processor), and DOPE (Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment). None of these languages became a widespread success but they provided excellent preparation for the main event. By 1963, the LGP-30 has become outdated and Dartmouth replaced it with General Electric GE-225 and Datanet-30 computers. Kurtz supervised the development of a timesharing system for the GE computers and Kemeny developed a compiler for the next experimental Dartmouth programming language, the Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code—or BASIC.

At the same time, Stanley Frankel went on to develop even smaller machines. He designed a desktop calculator for SCM, which inadvertently ended up putting Hewlett-Packard’s Loveland division into the calculator business in 1969. Some of HP’s desktop machines eventually ran HP’s own flavor of BASIC, called Rocky Mountain BASIC.

Which brings us to the trigger for this post. Last night, a mystery board arrived. My latest eBay purchase. It was clearly a ROM board for HP’s 9826 desktop computer. The last desktop machine HP developed before I stopped working there. The HP 9826 appeared in 1982 and was an early Motorola 68000-based computer that ran Rocky Mountain BASIC, HPL (HP’s proprietary programming language that looks a lot like BASIC with the vowels sucked out), and Pascal. The language board could have contained any of these three. It turned out to be Rock Mountain BASIC version 5.1, introduced in 1987.

Rocky Mountain BASIC 5.1 language ROM board from eBay

I plugged the board into my 9826, powered it up, and was greeted with the splash screen for Rocky Mountain BASIC 5.1. A dead language, revived. Except that BASIC isn’t really dead. It may have fallen out of favor—superseded by C and other more modern programming languages—but BASIC still runs under the hood of Microsoft Office, which is pretty widespread. My relic merely serves as a reminder of how we got here.