Dartmouth College is a private Ivy League university that played a significant role in computing history. It was the site of the 1956 conference that founded artificial intelligence as a field and where BASIC was created.
1956 Dartmouth Conference
John McCarthy organized the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence in 1956. This conference, attended by Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, and others, established AI as a field and coined the term “artificial intelligence.”
Creating BASIC
In 1964, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz created BASIC at Dartmouth to make computing accessible to all students. The Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS) allowed multiple students to use computers simultaneously.
Computing Education Pioneer
Dartmouth pioneered making computing accessible:
- Time-sharing for student access
- BASIC for non-specialist students
- Universal computing literacy as a goal
Legacy
Dartmouth’s contributions to computing include:
- BASIC language (1964)
- AI as a named field (1956)
- Time-sharing systems
- Computing education philosophy