True BASIC traces its history to an offshoot of Dartmouth BASIC called Structured BASIC, or SBASIC for short. This was released sometime in 1975 or 1976, but was not installed as the mainline version of BASIC on the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS) that supported the campus. Shortly after, Kemeny became involved in an effort to produce an ANSI standard BASIC in an attempt to bring together the many small variations of the language that had developed through the late 1960s and early 1970s. This effort initially focused on a system known as "Minimal BASIC" that was similar to early Dartmouth BASIC but with string variables added, while later work was aimed at a "Standard BASIC" that was essentially SBASIC.