Editing Dartmouth BASIC (section)

===Influence===
Time-sharing was a major area of research in the 1960s, with many in the computer industry predicting that computing power would become inexpensive and widespread. This was most famously stated by John McCarthy, who said "computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is a public utility."<ref>{{cite book|title=Architects of the Information Society, Thirty-Five Years of the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT|editor1-first=Hal|editor1-last=Abelson|first1=Simson|last1=Garfinkel|isbn=978-0-262-07196-3|publisher=MIT Press|year=1999|page=1|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Fc7dkLGLKrcC&pg=PA1|location=Cambridge}}</ref>

While other languages were available on DTSS, {{as of|1972|lc=y}} 98% of its programs were written in BASIC.<ref name="kemeny1972">{{Cite book |last=Kemeny |first=John G. |url=https://archive.org/details/mancomputer00keme/page/32/mode/2up?view=theater |title=Man and the Computer |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons |year=1972 |location=New York |pages=32–37, 41–42 |isbn=9780684130095 |language=en-US |lccn=72-1176}}</ref> With BASIC, computer services became far more accessible to end-users whose tasks would take too long to code for them to be suitable for solving on a computer. This led to a number of manufacturers who introduced computers specifically designed for this market of users who wanted to solve small or medium-scale tasks and were not as worried about outright performance. In particular, two machines aimed directly at this market became the "most widely used small time-sharing systems ever developed".{{sfn|Kurtz|1981|p=534}}

The [[HP 2000]] ran [[HP Time-Shared BASIC]], a combination of a BASIC and a time-share operating system almost identical to the DTSS setup. The system supported up to 32 simultaneous users, using a low-end HP 2100 CPU to run the terminals in the same fashion as the Datanet-30 of the original GE-265 setup, while the programs ran on a higher-end model of the same machine, typically differing in that it had more [[core memory]]. HP's BASIC used a semi-compiled [[lexical analysis#Tokenization|tokenized]] format for storing programs, which improved loading times and meant "compiles" were zero-time.<ref>{{cite book |url=ftp://ftp.mrynet.com/pub/os/HP2000/pdf/02000-90002_2000A_UG_Aug69.pdf |title=A Guide to Time Shared BASIC |date=August 1969 |publisher=Hewlett Packard}}</ref>

[[Digital Equipment Corporation]] took a different approach, using a single-machine offering based on their existing [[PDP-11]] line with the new [[RSTS/E]] operating system and [[BASIC-PLUS]]. BASIC-PLUS more closely followed the Fifth Edition, including the <code>MAT</code> commands, but was implemented as a pure interpreter as opposed to the Dartmouth compiler or HP's tokenized format. It also included a number of control structures following the [[JOSS]] model, like {{code|2=basic|PRINT I IF I > 10}}.<ref name=plus>{{cite book |url=http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/dec/pdp11/rsts/V04/DEC-11-ORBPA-A-D_BASIC-PLUS_LangMan_Oct72.pdf |title=BASIC-PLUS Manual |date=1972 |publisher=DEC}}</ref> [[Tymshare SUPER BASIC]] also supported JOSS-style structures and matrix math, but retained the original compile-and-go operation.

Practically every vendor of the era offered some solution to this same problem, although they may not have been so closely similar to the original. When Kurtz began considering the formation of an [[ANSI]] standard for BASIC in 1973, he found that the number of time-sharing service bureaus with BASIC available was greater than any other language. Unfortunately, this success was also a problem; by that point, there were so many variations that a standard seemed impossible.{{sfn|Kurtz|1981|p=534}}