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 ...

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.

Thomas E. Kurtz, a pioneering mathematician at Dartmouth College and an inventor of the simplified computer programming language known as BASIC, which allowed students to easily operate early ...

Why it matters: There's a good chance you cut your coding teeth on BASIC if you took a computer class back in the 20th century. The Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code celebrated its 60th ...

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 ...

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 ...

Controlling a lunar lander using a 1980s home computer is not for the faint of heart, and this project shows how one intrepid ...

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 ...