BASIC FTBALL and Computer Programming for All
Bibliography
Vee, A. (2023). BASIC FTBALL and Computer Programming for All. Digital Humanities Quaterly, 17(2). https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/17/2/000696/000696.html
Abstract
In late fall 1965, John Kemeny wrote a 239-line BASIC program called FTBALL***. Along with his colleague Thomas Kurtz and a few work-study students at Dartmouth College, Kemeny had developed the BASIC programming language and Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS). BASIC and DTSS represented perhaps the earliest successful attempt at “computer programming for all,” combining English-language vocabulary, simple yet robust instructions, and near-realtime access to a mainframe computer. This article takes a closer look at FTBALL as a crucial program in the history of “programming for all” while gesturing to the tension between a conception of “all” and FTBALL’s context in an elite, all-male college in the mid1960s. I put FTBALL in a historical, cultural, gendered context of “programming for all” as well as the historical context of programming language development, timesharing technology, and the hardware and financial arrangements necessary to support this kind of playful, interactive program in 1965. I begin with a short history of BASIC’s early development, compare FTBALL with other early games and sports games, then move into the hardware and technical details that enabled the code before finally reading FTBALL’s code in detail. Using methods from critical code studies (Marino 2020), I point to specific innovations of BASIC at the time and outline the program flow of FTBALL. This history and code reading of BASIC FTBALL provides something of interest to computing historians, marinoCriticalCodeStudies2020 practitioners, and games scholars and aficionados.
Notes
The article looks at the development of the BASIC and an early digital game, FTBALL, that helped popularizing this programming language. While BASIC, developed by Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth College, was intended to introduce students to computing, FTBALL was the product of a dominant masculine culture. The language developer’s intentions are paralleled by Jean-Daniel Nicoud, wo had similar approaches at the EPFL with the Smaky and CALM.
While they generally described their pedagogical motivations along the lines of civic engagement, as above, Kurtz also told me they were invested in the creative potential of the computer. (Page 4)
Besides companies or people trying to sell microcomputers, there is another demographic of people who seem to be “in the know”. They experienced the potential of computers and could envision how this technology can be of use for society, besides war or science, influencing how they taught and taught programming practices. In their endeavours, they had to deal with the question of “usefullness” [@swalwellHomebrewGamingBeginnings2021]. Finally, BASIC as a programming language helped tremendously to popularize microcomputers for home usage, since it made these machines accessible to a wide audience outside academia.
Taking up the notion of “usefullness”, games divided opinions. Especially those leaning towards protestant work ethics, could not see the use in playing video games. FTBALL creates an interesting arc here:
Because they [sports games] translate well and rely on cultural knowledge not associated with computing knowledge, sports games have helped to bring computer games to a wider audience. Sports games also affected the evolution of computer games more generally, according to John Wills in Gamer Nation: [T]hese early sports games enshrined the medium of video games as fundamentally sport-like and competitive. The opportunity to play American sports proved eminently attractive, and game consoles sold on their strength of sports titles. Video games served as an extension of fan service, part of the ritual of following favorite teams and championship events… [Wills 2019, 35] FTBALL is thus part of this early lineage of fan service, both at Dartmouth specifically — it celebrated a Dartmouth championship game, after all — and in sports and computer games more generally. (Page 9)
Sport games, then, seem more “usefull” then other games because they tie directly into vernacular culture. But, it also ties these games, like FTBALL, into domininant and toxic masculine college cultures
Examining the cultural context, Rankin associates the popularity of FTBALL and its subsequent iterations with the masculine culture of Dartmouth computing. Dartmouth then and now is associated with a kind of “jock” culture and was all-male at the time Kemeny composed FTBALL. (Page 9)
This also indicates, that FTBALL and other early sport games were early translations of toxic masculinity into digital games, already establishing such grounds for later issues with masculinity.
Lastly, an interesting aspect is Conceptualizing Programming as a craft (as opposed to something mechanical or math), something which was evident already early on:
To encourage students to correct their own errors, Kemeny and Kurtz designed the compiler not to check line by line prior to compiling [Kurtz 1981, 522]. As they wrote in 1968, “We find the instantaneous error messages of other systems annoying and a waste of time. It is very much like having an English teacher look over your shoulder as you are writing a rough draft of a composition. (Page 14)
This branding of programming as a creative activity is mirrored by others during the same time, e.g. Hoess, who compares programming to pottery.