Creation of BASIC

BASIC, short for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, was created at Dartmouth College in the United States by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz. They designed it so that students outside science and engineering could write and run programs without specialist training. It ran on a time-sharing system, which let many users work at terminals on the same computer at once, a novelty in the mid-1960s. Its simple English-like commands made it easy to learn. In the 1970s and 1980s versions of BASIC came built into most home computers, including Microsoft's early product for the Altair, and introduced a generation of people to programming. Many dialects followed, and the language lived on in forms such as Visual Basic.

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