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 ...

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.

Early in BASIC's history, its creators, John Kemeny (left) and Thomas Kurtz (center) go over a program with a Dartmouth student Early in BASIC's history, its creators, John Kemeny (left) and Thomas ...

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 ...

I must be kidding, right? No, I’m not. I’m just suggesting that we take another look at the old programming language known as BASIC. The language has a great deal going for it, particularly that it’s ...

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 ...

Thomas Eugene Kurtz, a pioneer in computer science whose vision of accessible computing transformed education and technology, passed away on 12 November at the age of 96. Kurtz’s enduring ...

“I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran.” —Tony Hoare, winner of the 1980 Turing Award, in 1982. Take a tour through the research ...