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.

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.

Computer coding ability has gotten especially hip recently. People who can’t code revere it as 21st century sorcery, while those who do it professionally are often driven to fits by it. And it was 50 ...

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 ...

The BASIC source code was fundamental to the early era of home computing as the foundation of many of Commodore's computers.

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 ...

In the era of vibe coding, when even professionals are pawning off their programming work on AI tools, Microsoft is throwing it all the way back to the language that launched a billion devices. On ...