That’s because it was the first high-level language for many of the early PCs, such as the Apple II, Commodore PET, VIC-20, and one of the first important gaming platforms, the Nintendo Entertainment ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

One of the key advantages of BASIC is that it can be learned quickly. It removes the need for users to understand low-level code constructs or how the underlying computer hardware works. Furthermore, ...

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, ...

Did you know that, between 1976 and 1978, Microsoft developed its own version of the BASIC programming language? It was initially called Altair BASIC before becoming Microsoft BASIC, and it was ...

Home Computer Archeology: Few early Microsoft products left as lasting a mark as 6502 BASIC. The interpreter introduced millions of people to computers and programming, shaping the next generation of ...