A Short History of BASIC
BASIC was created in 1964 by two Dartmouth mathematics professors, John George Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz. It was their intention to widen the use of computers beyond the science and mathematics departments, opening the way for new uses of technology in education. BASIC was offered free of charge (a much more difficult decision before the affordable dispersal methods of the Internet) and became a standard on a number of new computers released in the next decade.When the home computer gained popularity in the mid-1970s, BASIC was sucked forward in its wake. A popular interpreter called Altair BASIC was developed by a fledgling company called Micro-Soft in 1975. New magazines devoted to computer hobbyists made simple programming exercises (like games and utilities) easy to spread and learn, and books like Ahl’s BASIC Computer Games were also popular resources.In the 1980s, the use of original BASIC began to dwindle, but Visual BASIC (introduced in 1991) made the name recognizable to a whole new generation. However, this language had little In common with the original text-based language, and was instead an object-oriented, event-driven language. Variants of the original BASIC language appeared throughout the last few decades, including our friend, ethosBASIC. You can see a more comprehensive listing of the BASIC variants available for Microsoft Windows on the “Windows BASIC Dialects” page.