User:51mplex/drydock

BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose high-level programming languages, first introduced in 1964. As the name suggests, it was created with ease of use in mind.

Origins and historical use

Relatively few high-level languages existed in the 1960s, and all major ones (COBOL, FORTRAN, Lisp, ALGOL) were intended for business or scientific use. Their requirements were large, and they were too difficult to learn for a typical computer user. The original BASIC was created at Dartmouth College, by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz, for use by non-science students. They released the original compiler free of charge.

In the early microcomputer era (late 1970s and 1980s), BASIC rapidly spread to many microcomputing platforms, including Apple, Atari and the IBM PC. They often contained a firmware implementation, which lead to many forks of the original language.

BASIC was important to Microsoft in its early days, and its influence survives in the form of Visual Basic and Visual Basic .NET.

Characteristics

BASIC is an imperative, traditionally unstructured language, which