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.

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 ...

Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s when you turned on a PC, more often than not, you’d get a Basic prompt. Most people would then load a game from a tape, but if you were inclined to program you ...

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 ...

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 ...

Computer coding ability has gotten especially hip recently. People who can’t code revere it as 21st century sorcery, while those who do it professionally are often driven to fits by it. And it was 50 ...

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 ...

Large Language Models (LLMs) seem to be everywhere now. Chatbots, coding assistants and research all promise transformative efficiency. Yet too many businesses discover an inconvenient truth: asking ...