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.

Computer coding ability has gotten especially hip recently. People who can’t code revere it as 21st century sorcery, while those who do it professionally are often driven to fits by it. And it was 50 ...

Knowing how to program a computer is good for you, and it’s a shame more people don’t learn to do it. For years now, that’s been a hugely popular stance. It’s led to educational initiatives as ...

Fifty years ago this month, in 1964, a computer programming language winked to life that changed the course of a generation. While many would point to the rise of Unix and other ubiquitous programming ...

60 years ago, the inventors of the BASIC programming language actually achieved what they had hoped for: simple programming that is accessible to everyone. At 4:00 a.m. on May 1, 1964, the first BASIC ...

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 ...

Computers speak binary—long strings of 1s and 0s that tell them what to do. Some people can speak binary, too. As the joke goes: "There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand ...

John G. Kemeny (left) and Thomas E. Kurtz made a truly Basic contribution to computer science in 1964. Courtesy Dartmouth Library __1964: __ In the predawn hours of May Day, two professors at ...

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