Dennis Allison is a lecturer at Stanford University, a position he has held since 1976. Allison was a founding member of the

People's Computer Company People's Computer Company (PCC) was an organization, a newsletter (the ''People's Computer Company Newsletter'') and, later, a quasiperiodical called the ''Dragonsmoke''. PCC was founded and produced by Dennis Allison, Bob Albrecht and George Fir ...

. Allison in 1975 wrote a specification for a microcomputer interpreter for the BASIC programming language The ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) reprinted the Tiny Basic design notes from the January 1976 Tiny BASIC Journal. which became known as

Tiny Basic Tiny BASIC is a family of Programming language#Dialects, flavors and implementations, dialects of the BASIC programming language that can fit into 4 or fewer kilobyte, KBs of random-access memory, memory. Tiny BASIC was designed in response to th ...

. Allison was urged to create the standard by

Bob Albrecht Bob Albrecht is a key figure in the early history of microcomputers. He was one of the founders of the People's Computer Company and its associated newsletters which turned into '' Dr. Dobb's Journal.'' He also brought the first Altair 8800 to t ...

of the

Homebrew Computer Club The Homebrew Computer Club was an early computer hobbyist group in Menlo Park, California, which met from March 1975 to December 1986. The club had an influential role in the development of the microcomputer revolution and the rise of that asp ...

who had seen BASIC on minicomputers and felt it would be the perfect match for new machines like the MITS Altair 8800, which had been released in January 1975. This design did not support text strings or

floating point In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. For example, 12.345 can b ...

arithmetic, thus only using integer arithmetic. The goal was for the program to fit in 2 to 3

kilobyte The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The International System of Units (SI) defines the prefix '' kilo'' as 1000 (103); per this definition, one kilobyte is 1000 bytes.International Standard IEC 80000-13 Quant ...

s of memory. Allison published his work in the People's Computer Company newsletter in 1975. The Tiny BASIC contents of the newsletter soon became '' Dr. Dobb's Journal of Tiny BASIC'' with a subtitle of "Calisthenics & Orthodontia, Running Light Without Overbyte." By the middle of 1976, Tiny BASIC interpreters were available for the

Intel 8080 The Intel 8080 (''"eighty-eighty"'') is the second 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel. It first appeared in April 1974 and is an extended and enhanced variant of the earlier 8008 design, although without binary compatibil ...

, the

Motorola 6800 The 6800 ("''sixty-eight hundred''") is an 8-bit microprocessor designed and first manufactured by Motorola in 1974. The MC6800 microprocessor was part of the M6800 Microcomputer System (latter dubbed ''68xx'') that also included serial and para ...

and

MOS Technology 6502 The MOS Technology 6502 (typically pronounced "sixty-five-oh-two" or "six-five-oh-two") William Mensch and the moderator both pronounce the 6502 microprocessor as ''"sixty-five-oh-two"''. is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by a small te ...

processors. This was a forerunner of the free software community's collaborative development before the internet allowed easy transfer of files, and was an example of a free software project before the

free software movement The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run the software, to study the software, to modify the software, and to share copies of the s ...

. From 1989 to 2004 Allison and microprocessor architect John H. Wharton coordinated Stanford University's EE-380 Computer Systems Colloquium.Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
John Wharton, Stanford University

References

External links

Personal web page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Allison, Dennis Stanford University Department of Electrical Engineering faculty Living people Place of birth missing (living people) Year of birth missing (living people)