News

Want to build on Bill Gates? Microsoft open-sourced the original code written by the company founder - now it's over to you

Microsoft open-sourced Bill Gates’ 1976 6502 BASIC interpreter, showcasing early programming features and its historical role ...

Microsoft Goes Back to BASIC, Open-Sources Bill Gates’ Code

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

Back to BASIC—the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing

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 ...
ZDNet

BASIC turns 60: Why simplicity was this programming language's blessing and its curse

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.