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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Late last week, Microsoft released the complete source code for Microsoft BASIC for 6502 Version 1.1, the 1978 interpreter that powered early personal computers like the Commodore PET, VIC-20, ...

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.

For three years — ever since my son Ben was in fifth grade — he and I have engaged in a quixotic but determined quest: We’ve searched for a simple and straightforward way to get the introductory ...

Universities are no strangers to innovating with technology. EdTech wouldn’t exist if that weren’t true. But colleges were truly at the forefront when it came to the development of computer science.

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about innovation, the future of work and remote work. The future of programming and AI is more nuanced than headlines ...