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.

I'd like to take a brief moment to introduce you to a small project at Microsoft that has received very little press: Small Basic. Developed by Microsoft employee Vijaye Raji, the Small Basic language ...

Last month, Microsoft announced that it would stop adding new language features to Visual Basic, a programming language first shipped in 1991 as one of the tech titan's first major efforts in making ...

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 ...

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 ...

On May 1st, 1964, two Dartmouth professors by the names of John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz debuted BASIC, a revolutionary programming language credited for expanding computer literacy outside the realm ...

Back in the early 1960s, programming for computers was a job that was just for computer scientists. That changed 50 years ago today with the introduction of BASIC, a computer language that was created ...

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.

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 ...