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.

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 ...

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.