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 ...

Early in BASIC's history, its creators, John Kemeny (left) and Thomas Kurtz (center) go over a program with a Dartmouth student Early in BASIC's history, its creators, John Kemeny (left) and Thomas ...

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 ...

At Dartmouth, long before the days of laptops and smartphones, he worked to give more students access to computers. That work helped propel generations into a new world. By Kenneth R. Rosen Thomas E.

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 ...

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 ...