Editing BASIC (section)

== Spread on time-sharing services ==
The emergence of BASIC took place as part of a wider movement toward time-sharing systems. First conceptualized during the late 1950s, the idea became so dominant in the computer industry by the early 1960s that its proponents were speaking of a future in which users would "buy time on the computer much the same way that the average household buys power and water from utility companies".<ref name="wfbauer">Bauer, W. F., ''[https://www.computer.org/web/csdl/index/-/csdl/proceedings/afips/1958/5053/00/50530046.pdf Computer design from the programmer's viewpoint] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160723012920/https://www.computer.org/web/csdl/index/-/csdl/proceedings/afips/1958/5053/00/50530046.pdf |date=July 23, 2016 }}'' (Eastern Joint Computer Conference, December 1958) One of the first descriptions of computer time-sharing.</ref>

General Electric, having worked on the Dartmouth project, wrote their own underlying operating system and launched an online time-sharing system known as Mark I. It featured BASIC as one of its primary selling points. Other companies in the emerging field quickly followed suit; [[Tymshare]] introduced [[SUPER BASIC]] in 1968, [[CompuServe]] had a version on the [[DEC-10]] at their launch in 1969, and by the early 1970s BASIC was largely universal on general-purpose [[mainframe computers]]. Even [[IBM]] eventually joined the club with the introduction of VS-BASIC in 1973.<ref>{{cite magazine |magazine=Computerworld |date=5 December 1973 |title=IBM VS the World: That's How It Is |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=sWeKU3wFLREC&pg=PA15}}</ref>

Although time-sharing services with BASIC were successful for a time, the widespread success predicted earlier was not to be. The emergence of minicomputers during the same period, and especially low-cost microcomputers in the mid-1970s, allowed anyone to purchase and run their own systems rather than buy online time which was typically billed at dollars per minute.{{efn|Tymshare charged about {{US$|10}} per hour ({{Inflation|US|10|1970|fmt=eq}}) for accessing their systems.}}<ref>{{cite book |title=A History of Online Information Services, 1963–1976 |first1= Charles |last1=Bourne |first2=Trudi Bellardo |last2=Hahn |page=387 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=LTTvmUU8rskC&pg=PA387|isbn= 9780262261753 |date= August 2003 |publisher= MIT Press }}</ref>