Thomas E Kurtz, co-creator of the BASIC programming language, died November 12th at 96:
Dr. Kurtz and John G. Kemeny, then the chairman of Dartmouth’s math department, believed that students would come to depend on computers and benefit from understanding how to use them.
“We had the crazy idea that our students, our undergraduate students, who are not going to be technically employed later on — social sciences and humanities students — should learn how to use the computer,” Dr. Kurtz said in an interview for Dartmouth in 2014. “Completely nutty idea.”
At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall on the Dartmouth campus, the time-sharing system and BASIC were put to a test. A professor and a student programmer typed a simple command — “RUN” — into neighboring Teletype terminals and watched as both received the same answer simultaneously. It worked.
I don't have the earliest programs I wrote because nothing survives from the TRS-80 era, when we saved everything to cassette tape (!), nor from the Apple ][+ era because I never converted those files to PC format. But here is a little thing I wrote in October 1987 in the BASICA (Advanced BASIC) language that shipped with MS DOS 3:
5 DEFDBL A-Z 6 PRINT 7 PRINT 10 INPUT "Number to test = ",N# 15 U$="##########" 16 IF N#<10000000# THEN U$="#######" 17 IF N#<1000000! THEN U$="######" 18 IF N#<100000! THEN U$="#####" 19 IF N#<10000 THEN U$="####" 20 N#=INT(N#) 30 TEST#=1 33 WHILE TEST#<=SQR(N#) 36 TEST#=TEST#+1 40 IF N#/TEST# = INT (N#/TEST#) THEN GOSUB 100 50 WEND 55 PRINT 60 PRINT "I found";FACTORS;"factor(s)." 70 IF FACTORS=0 THEN PRINT "The number"N"is prime." 80 PRINT 81 INPUT "Test another (y/n)";A$ 82 IF INSTR(A$,"Y") OR INSTR(A$,"y") THEN RUN 90 END 100 FACTORS=FACTORS+1 120 PRINT USING U$;TEST#; 130 PRINT " * "; 140 PRINT USING U$;N#/TEST# 150 RETURN
If you can find a DOS emulator with BASICA, knock yourself out.