Dennis Allison

Dennis Allison is a lecturer at Stanford University, a post he has held since 1976, and an early figure of the personal computer hobbyist movement. He was a founding member of the People's Computer Company. In 1975 he wrote the specification for a microcomputer interpreter of the BASIC language that became known as Tiny BASIC, prompted by Bob Albrecht of the Homebrew Computer Club, who felt BASIC would suit new machines such as the MITS Altair 8800. The design used integer arithmetic only, with no strings or floating point, so that the interpreter could fit in two to three kilobytes of memory. It was published in the People's Computer Company newsletter, which became Dr. Dobb's Journal of Tiny BASIC, and by mid 1976 versions existed for several processors. From 1989 to 2004 he and John H. Wharton coordinated the Stanford EE-380 Computer Systems Colloquium.