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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

Windows only: If you've never played around with programming before, this weekend is a perfect time to start. Small Basic is a recent offering from Microsoft based on the venerable BASIC programming ...

Specifically, it's a port of BASIC, the OS that founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed for use on the Intel 8080-powered Altair 8800. As explained in a Microsoft blog, the version that's just ...

Ah yes, my first programming language on trash-80. I wouldn't go back tho. However, I would take Basic any day over Cobol. I'm getting really tired of migrating old code from the 70s. Same. I bought a ...