Long before you were picking up Python and JavaScript, in the predawn darkness of May 1, 1964, a modest but pivotal moment in computing history unfolded at Dartmouth College. Mathematicians John G.

The BASIC source code was fundamental to the early era of home computing as the foundation of many of Commodore's computers.

Computer coding ability has gotten especially hip recently. People who can’t code revere it as 21st century sorcery, while those who do it professionally are often driven to fits by it. And it was 50 ...

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 ...

Nearly half a century after Bill Gates first began writing software that would launch Microsoft, the company has made that code public. In early September, it placed the assembly source for its 6502 ...

Microsoft open-sourced the MS-BASIC language. Bill Gates would never have seen this coming back in the day. MS-BASIC 1.1 was many developers' first language. In 1976, they rebranded Altair BASIC to ...

Surely BASIC is properly obsolete by now, right? Perhaps not. In addition to inspiring a large part of home computing today, BASIC is still very much alive today, even outside of retro computing.

In the era of vibe coding, when even professionals are pawning off their programming work on AI tools, Microsoft is throwing it all the way back to the language that launched a billion devices. On ...

The smash indie hit Minecraft is more than just a game: it's a learning tool that's been used to teach Japanese and JavaScript code, but how about writing and executing programs while in-game? Yeah, ...

New research might widen access to learning computer programming. Source: skynesher/iStock It is routinely assumed that to be a computer programmer—to write code, in other words—you need to be good at ...