Invented by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, BASIC was first successfully used to run programs on the school’s General Electric computer system 50 ...

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.

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 ...

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.

Have I told you the story about Bill Gates and me in those early days of personal computing? To be clear: Bill Gates is older than I am. In 1975, as Bill was leaving Harvard to start Microsoft, I had ...