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.
Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing and inspire generations of programmers over the next six decades.
In its most traditional form, BASIC is an interpreted programming language that runs line by line, with line numbers.
Prior to BASIC, programming languages like Fortran, Algol, and COBOL proved complex and were primarily used by professionals. Kemeny and Kurtz saw a need for amateurs who were not dedicated computer engineers to be able to use computers as well.
In 1975, Paul Allen and Bill Gates adapted the language for personal computers like the Altair 8800, expanding its reach to a new audience of small computer owners and founding Microsoft in the process. In 1976, Steve Wozniak developed a BASIC interpreter from scratch for the Apple I using self-taught methods and minimal resources.
Today, BASIC remains popular in hobbyist retrocomputing circles, but few use it as a practical language. And yet it never truly died out—instead, it continued to evolve.
Meanwhile, other modern languages, such as Python and JavaScript, have taken on roles similar to those once filled by BASIC.
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