10 LET "date" = "1st May 1964"

20 LET "place" = "Dartmouth College, New Hampshire"

30 PRINT "John G Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz designed BASIC"

BASIC was designed to allow users of the Dartmouth college timesharing mainframe to write programs, even if they weren't fluent in the computer programming languages of the day.

Like all good languages it had a diverse derivation, a mixture of Fortran and Algol 60 with a few other influences thrown in. As its popularity grew, a range of dialects emerged, ranging from Sinclair BASIC, where each command was assigned its own key on the keyboard, to Microsoft BASIC, which was installed on many early IBM and IBM compatible personal computers, what we know today as the PC.

BASIC allowed a cohort of computer users to learn to write computer programs. During the 1980s, magazines and books containing BASIC programs sold in millions, allowing users to learn to code as they copied and modified the listings. It was also essential knowledge for gamers, as knowledge of BASIC could allow you to modify the game to give you infinite lives, in the days before the Konami cheat.

 

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