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 ...

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.

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.

Did you know that, between 1976 and 1978, Microsoft developed its own version of the BASIC programming language? It was initially called Altair BASIC before becoming Microsoft BASIC, and it was ...

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 ...

We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article. In Bill Gates' new autobiography, "Source Code: My Beginnings" (published February 4 by Knopf), the computer pioneer and ...