It’s a language for noobs, sure, but back then most everyone was a noob. Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, BASIC sent a shock wave through teenage tech culture.

On May 1st, the BASIC programming language, first developed by Dartmouth College Professors Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny, celebrates 50 years. At the time, computers were highly serial.

Since the 1960s, BASIC has introduced countless beginners to computer programming. Here's how the language got started, the paths it cleared for Windows and Apple, and where you can still find it ...

Probably not. QBASIC is a software interpreter for the BASIC programming language that showed up in 1991, and basic it is.

Universities and the Future of Programming Languages Some universities haven’t stopped innovating when it comes to creating the languages themselves. Just over a decade ago, the Massachusetts ...

BASIC wasn’t his only bête noire among programming languages: He also spewed bile in the direction of FORTRAN (an “infantile disorder”), PL/1 (“fatal disease”) and COBOL (“criminal ...

Small Basic is a recent offering from Microsoft based on the venerable BASIC programming language and implemented with .NET. Designed for coding novices and children, the system is easy to learn ...

Nowadays, "basic" has a very different and derogatory Urban Dictionary-style meaning. Fifty years ago on this very day, however, it was the name given to a new computer-programming language born ...

The language consists of just 15 keywords, but the IDE is surprisingly powerful to anyone who is just getting started. In fact, Small Basic allows third-party libraries to be plugged in for even ...