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 ...

At Dartmouth, long before the days of laptops and smartphones, he worked to give more students access to computers. That work helped propel generations into a new world. By Kenneth R. Rosen Thomas E.

On May 1st, 1964, two Dartmouth professors by the names of John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz debuted BASIC, a revolutionary programming language credited for expanding computer literacy outside the realm ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

At the start of the 1970s computing and programming languages in particular looked well settled into a rut with Fortran, Algol and Cobol being the standards plus various specialist languages with ...

When high-level programming languages first emerged in the 1950s, code was mainly based on combinations of command-based instructions and mathematical expressions. Because of this, imperative ...