Two things happened on 31 May, thirty-four years apart, that between them explain a great deal about the machine you are reading this on: the birth of the man who made programming something a first-year student could do, and the publication of the thesis that worked out how computers could share a network without getting in each other’s way.
1926: John Kemeny
John George Kemeny was born in Budapest on 31 May 1926 and left Hungary with his family in 1940, ahead of the war. He was a mathematics undergraduate at Princeton when he was drafted into the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, where he worked under John von Neumann on the calculations for the bomb; back at Princeton he was Albert Einstein’s research assistant while finishing his doctorate. In 1953 he joined the mathematics department at Dartmouth College, and it was there, in 1964, that he and his colleague Thomas Kurtz wrote a programming language for students who were not going to be computer scientists. They called it BASIC — Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code — and its rules were that commands should be ordinary English words, that a beginner should be able to write a working program in an afternoon, and that the computer should reply immediately. Every home computer of the 1980s shipped with it; Microsoft’s first product was a BASIC. Kemeny was president of Dartmouth from 1970 to 1981, where he admitted women and, after the Three Mile Island accident, chaired the commission that investigated it. He died on 26 December 1992.
1960: Leonard Kleinrock
On the same date in 1960 a doctoral student at MIT, Leonard Kleinrock, submitted his thesis, Information Flow in Large Communication Nets. It applied queueing theory — the mathematics of waiting in line — to the delays messages suffer in a switched network, and showed how a network could break messages into pieces and route them efficiently. Published as a book in 1964, the work became the theoretical basis for packet switching, and Kleinrock’s laboratory at UCLA was the first node of ARPANET when it went live in 1969; the first message ever sent over the network that became the internet left his lab. He was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012 and, at 88, still teaches at UCLA.
The Bangladesh footnote
BASIC was the first language most Bangladeshis of a certain age ever typed: it ran on the IBM-compatible PCs that reached BUET, the banks and the Farmgate training centres in the late 1980s, as GW-BASIC and then QBasic, and it was what the first computer courses at Dhaka schools taught in the 1990s. Kemeny’s idea — that the language should meet the student, not the other way round — is the one that Python inherited, and the reason it is now the language those schools teach instead.
