I was entering the miseries of seventh grade in the fall of 1980 when a friend dragged me into a dimly lit second-floor room. The school had recently installed a newfangled Commodore PET computer, a ...

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 in a ...

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 the ...

On May 1st, 1964, two Dartmouth professors by the names of John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz debuted BASIC, a revolutionary programming language credited for expanding computer literacy outside the realm ...

Can you believe it? The BASIC programming language is 50 years old this month. As you may know, BASIC was created in 1964 by Dartmouth College professors John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz as a system to ...

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 60th ...

Windows only: If you've never played around with programming before, this weekend is a perfect time to start. Small Basic is a recent offering from Microsoft based on the venerable BASIC programming ...

Ah yes, my first programming language on trash-80. I wouldn't go back tho. However, I would take Basic any day over Cobol. I'm getting really tired of migrating old code from the 70s. Same. I bought a ...