Long before you were picking up Python and JavaScript, in the predawn darkness of May 1, 1964, a modest but pivotal moment in computing history unfolded at Dartmouth College. Mathematicians John G.

Knowing how to program a computer is good for you, and it’s a shame more people don’t learn to do it. For years now, that’s been a hugely popular stance. It’s led to educational initiatives as ...

Microsoft has open sourced GW-BASIC, a programming language developed some 38 years ago. GW-BASIC and variants such as QBasic, QuickBasic and others provided the onramp to computer programming for ...

For years, the lingua franca for desktop computers was the Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, a.k.a. Basic. Essentially every PC had it, and just about anyone could learn to program ...

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 typing in small ...

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, if you had a personal computer there was a fair chance it either booted into some version of Microsoft Basic or you could load and run Basic. There were other ...

Microsoft’s GW-BASIC is a programming language that was released in 1983 and bundled with MS-DOS on early PCs. It was the first programming language many students and developers learned in the 80s, ...

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 ...

In recent years, software giant Microsoft has been releasing the source code for some of its oldest operating systems under MIT open-source licenses. Examples include MS-DOS and GW-BASIC, and now ...

People who got their first taste of IT during the microcomputer boom in the 1970s and 1980s almost certainly started by writing programs in Basic — or, at least, they debugged programs typed in from ...