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As I understand the history, much of the original Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) catalog was written on their own timeshare platforms, which appear to be mostly the GE (and thus Dartmouth BASIC) and later a Cyber. It appears many of these were also released on the HP2000 series, which is a very different dialect.

I came across a reference to something called "MECC Quick Reference Guide for BASIC Language Version 3.1", but the link is dead and archive.org's first capture started three years after it was posted and already gone.

Does anyone have anything on MECC's BASIC standards, and perhaps a copy of this document or similar?

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    For people like me who have never heard of MECC, can you expand the initialism in the question? A bit of googling suggests "Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium", but it would improve the question to have it there, rather than in my comment. Mar 11, 2022 at 18:20
  • My very first exposure to programming was the MECC TIES HP200C BASIC. Never heard of the GE system. You also didn't mention the ill-fated Univac 1110 which was replaced by the Cyber 73 when it couldn't meet the requirements of its contract. Mar 21, 2022 at 4:16

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I may have found a copy off the document you're looking for. Is this it: Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium Quick Reference Guide (PDF)

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  • For me the PDF link didn't work until after I'd accessed it via the lined page. Some sort of attempt to prevent deep linking, I guess; the PDF link is correct.
    – Tommy
    Mar 12, 2022 at 17:34
  • Most excellent! Mar 12, 2022 at 20:20
  • So this appears to be the later Cyber 73 version, as it is running on KRONOS and seems very similar to the version I found in the v2.0 doc from DCD. The dialect is very much based on Dartmouth (cf. CHANGE). It lacks the ' for remarks that I see in contemporary Dartmouth code from Mac Oglesby, so likely patterned on an earlier version. Mar 12, 2022 at 20:35

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