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 ...

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 ...

Computer enthusiasts, programmers and hobbyists may be interested to know that the discontinued interpreter for the BASIC programming language, Altair BASIC has been published to GitHub. The ...

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 ...

Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That’s when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...