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.

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.

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 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 ...

In the era of vibe coding, when even professionals are pawning off their programming work on AI tools, Microsoft is throwing it all the way back to the language that launched a billion devices. On ...

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 ...

Microsoft just open-sourced 6502 BASIC (BASIC M6502 8K VER 1.1) from 1978. The code powered the Commodore PET, VIC-20, and C64, and underlies Applesoft BASIC on Apple II. Download it on GitHub to run, ...

The smash indie hit Minecraft is more than just a game: it's a learning tool that's been used to teach Japanese and JavaScript code, but how about writing and executing programs while in-game? Yeah, ...

Minecraft player and YouTuber SethBling has created a BASIC interpreter in vanilla Minecraft, making the programming language available inside the game (via Engadget and Motherboard). The interpreter ...