His programs were rife with programming techniques deeply tied to the TRS-80’s particular software and hardware, and in a quest for more speed than Microsoft BASIC was theoretically capable of ...

60 years ago, the inventors of the BASIC programming language actually achieved what they had hoped for: simple programming that is accessible to everyone.

BASIC began to be used in schools everywhere. Computers like the Research Machines 380Z and BBC Micro meant that students could start learning a few programming basics, without any need for access ...

[Mike] sent in a project he’s been working on – a port of a BASIC interpreter that fits on an Arduino. The code is meant to be a faithful port of Tiny BASIC for the 68000, and true to T… ...

Kemeny and Kurtz flipped the switch on the first BASIC program on May 1, 1964, at 4AM. Not long after, they made the language available for free to the larger computing community.

Inside the BASIC-1 is an Atmel XMega128A4, a keyboard from a broken Commodore 64, a joystick port, a serial to TV out adapter, and an SD card adapter for program storage.

If Basic had a domain, it was as a starter language, and there are many candidates to replace it, Fisher says. “The best ‘first language’ is a hot topic of debate,” she says.