BASIC is 60

Ars Technica reminds us that The BASIC programming language turns 60:

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 first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college’s General Electric GE-225 mainframe.

10 years later, BASIC became the default high-level programming language of micros in 70s and 80s. Even the IBM PC came with a basic interpreter. You would boot into the BASIC prompt.

One major provider of BASIC interpreter at the time was Microsoft. This was actually their first product: a BASIC interpreter for the Intel 8080 based Altair. Infamously Jack Tramiel of Commodore got a Microsoft BASIC license for a flat fee, while usually Microsoft insisted on a per-unit fee.

BASIC came into disfavor when compiled languages like Pascal and C made their way to be usable on PC, producing faster code. Later when C and then C++ becoming the defacto standards for PC¹ application development, instead of assembly language (for speed).

It remains that BASIC was instrumental for a whole generation of computer users back in the days when programming a computer was a “natural” way of using them, and when specialty magazine published software by printing listings of BASIC programs. In France, in the mid 80s, we had Hebdogiciel, a weekly magazine publishing weekly listings for the various home microcomputers.

I think that 60 years ago, Dartmouth effort was right: creating a languages that was easier to use, and used for more than a couple of decades.