50 years ago today, the BASIC computer language was born as two math professors from Dartmouth College used it to help run the school's computer system for the first time.

BASIC: The First Computer Language for the Masses. Before BASIC, computers were all punch cards and Ph.D.s. After, everyone from students to hobbyists could write a computer program if they wanted to.

An updated version of the classic "Basic Computer Games" book, with well-written examples in a variety of common MEMORY SAFE, SCRIPTING programming languages. See https://coding-horror.gi ...

But I’d just done so, thanks to this strangely accessible computer language: BASIC. ... If the program got to line 120, you could tell the computer to suddenly GOTO line 25, for example.

An updated version of the classic "Basic Computer Games" book, with well-written examples in a variety of common programming languages License Unlicense license ...

BASIC's creators used a similar computer four years later to develop the programming language. Credit: GE / Wikipedia A brochure for the GE 210 computer from 1964.

In Back to Basic: The History, Corruption and Future of the Language, their 1985 book, Kemeny and Kurtz offered this example of a program that met Basic’s goals of being a general-purpose language ...

Today, most computer users don’t see raw BASIC code when they turn on their machines. Probably nobody waits by the mailbox for a magazine or book full of code to arrive.

Thomas E. Kurtz, a mathematician and inventor of the simplified computer programming language known as BASIC, which allowed students to operate early computers and eventually propelled generations ...