Surely BASIC is properly obsolete by now, right? Perhaps not. In addition to inspiring a large part of home computing today, BASIC is still very much alive today, even outside of retro computing.

Back in the early 1960s, programming for computers was a job that was just for computer scientists. That changed 50 years ago today with the introduction of BASIC, a computer language that was created ...

John G. Kemeny (left) and Thomas E. Kurtz made a truly Basic contribution to computer science in 1964. Courtesy Dartmouth Library __1964: __ In the predawn hours of May Day, two professors at ...

The BASIC language may be considered old-hat here in 2025, and the days when a computer came as a matter of course with a BASIC interpreter are far behind us, but it can still provide many hours of ...

Take a cursory glance at the history of language in advertising and you’ll notice one thing: simplicity rules the day. Whether that’s the number of images used or the exact wording of an advertisement ...

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 ...

Microsoft open-sourced the MS-BASIC language. Bill Gates would never have seen this coming back in the day. MS-BASIC 1.1 was many developers' first language. In 1976, they rebranded Altair BASIC to ...

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 ...