This is why I’ve long argued that BASIC is the most consequential language in the history of computing. It’s a language for noobs, sure, but back then most everyone was a noob. Throughout the ...

BASIC revolutionized computing by making computers feel less institutional, and more like a tool the average human could use. Harry McCracken at TIME explains this shift far better than I ever ...

Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College.That's when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran ...

Why it matters: There's a good chance you cut your coding teeth on BASIC if you took a computer class back in the 20th century. The Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code celebrated its ...

For instance, there’s a famous one-line BASIC program for the Commodore 64 computer: 10 PRINT CHR$ ... Even Microsoft is back in the business of making BASIC useful for newbies.

For those of us old enough to remember the beginnings of the microcomputer revolution, we can look back fondly on ‘the programming environment is the OS,’ a ton of BASIC programs, and t… ...

Most famously, Bill Gates, whose computing life began when he devised a BASIC program to play noughts and crosses. The hardware was still primitive, of course. In particular, users interacted with ...

A version of the BASIC programming language derived from the original Dartmouth BASIC created by Kemeny and Kurtz. First developed by MAI Systems Corporation, it evolved into the BBx (Business ...

When Dartmouth College launched the Basic language 50 years ago, it enabled ordinary users to write code. Millions did. But we've gone backwards since then, and most users now seem unable or ...

Thomas E. Kurtz, who translated the exhilarating power of computer science in the 1960s as the coinventor of BASIC, a programming language that replaced inscrutable numbers and glyphs with ...

I was 5 or 6 when I got my first sense of the joys of computer programming. This was in the early 1980s, when few people had a computer. One day, my dad brought home a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, one of ...