Nowadays, "basic" has a very different and derogatory Urban Dictionary-style meaning. Fifty years ago on this very day, however, it was the name given to a new computer-programming language born in a ...

For years, the lingua franca for desktop computers was the Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, a.k.a. Basic. Essentially every PC had it, and just about anyone could learn to program ...

That was almost 50 years ago; since then, Microsoft has embraced open-source software. In recent years, Microsoft has started releasing some of its classic operating systems and programs as open ...

The seminal programming language got its start in a college research center in 1964, ended up defining home computer ownership in the late 1970s and 1980s, and has largely fallen out of use since.

Back in the CPM/CPM86 days a popular business basic was CBasic/Cbasic86. I did a lot of work for small businesses in those basics. These days I use VB for Windows/SQL work when necessary. Commodore 64 ...