Microsoft called the code—written by the company’s founder, Bill Gates, and its second-ever employee, Ric Weiland—”one of the ...

Why it matters: There's a good chance you cut your coding teeth on BASIC if you took a computer class back in the 20th century. The Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code celebrated its 60th ...

I was entering the miseries of seventh grade in the fall of 1980 when a friend dragged me into a dimly lit second-floor room. The school had recently installed a newfangled Commodore PET computer, a ...

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 ...

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 ...