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.

60 years ago, the inventors of the BASIC programming language actually achieved what they had hoped for: simple programming that is accessible to everyone. At 4:00 a.m. on May 1, 1964, the first BASIC ...

Ah yes, my first programming language on trash-80. I wouldn't go back tho. However, I would take Basic any day over Cobol. I'm getting really tired of migrating old code from the 70s. Same. I bought a ...

Today in programming language hacks we have string art rendered in BASIC. String art — also known as pin and thread art, or filography — is an art form where images are invoked by thread woven between ...

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 ...

On Wednesday, Microsoft released the complete source code for Microsoft BASIC for 6502 Version 1.1, the 1978 interpreter that powered the Commodore PET, VIC-20, Commodore 64, and Apple II through ...

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 ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. At the start of the 1960s, when most computers occupied an entire room, the world’s programmers could barely ...

Functional programming, as the name implies, is about functions. While functions are part of just about every programming paradigm, including JavaScript, a functional programmer has unique ...