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 ...

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 ...

Knowing how to program a computer is good for you, and it’s a shame more people don’t learn to do it. For years now, that’s been a hugely popular stance. It’s led to educational initiatives as ...

Universities are no strangers to innovating with technology. EdTech wouldn’t exist if that weren’t true. But colleges were truly at the forefront when it came to the development of computer science.

Can you believe it? The BASIC programming language is 50 years old this month. As you may know, BASIC was created in 1964 by Dartmouth College professors John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz as a system to ...

60 years ago, the inventors of the BASIC programming language actually achieved what they had hoped for: simple programming that is accessible to everyone. At 4:00 a.m. on May 1, 1964, the first BASIC ...

I'd like to take a brief moment to introduce you to a small project at Microsoft that has received very little press: Small Basic. Developed by Microsoft employee Vijaye Raji, the Small Basic language ...

This course introduces students to the key features of programming languages. Students implement a series of interpreters that nail down the precise details of how various aspects of programming ...