He picked up writing from a young age and started writing phone and gadget reviews in 2016. He loves reading spec sheets and tinkering with new technology. When he is not writing, you can catch him watching The Office or sharpening his programming chops. Sign in to your MakeUseOf account Summary BASIC was a beginner-friendly, free, and simple language that promoted computing literacy. BASIC was widely used in the 1970s and 1980s due to its accessibility and interactivity. Despite its decline in the 1990s, BASIC's legacy lives on in modern languages like Python and Java.
There are many programming languages in use today, but only a few can claim to have revolutionized computing. The BASIC programming language is one of them. It turned 60 years old on the 1st of May 2024.
Find out why BASIC has been one of the most important and influential programming languages.
What Is BASIC?BASIC is an acronym for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It launched in an era of low-level languages—mostly used by scientists and mathematicians—as a simpler, high-level programming language.
The language had its origins at Dartmouth College. It resulted from a collaboration between the then-chairman of the Mathematics department, Jordan G. Kemeny, and Professor Thomas E. Kurtz. Their vision was to promote computer and programming literacy among students in all fields.
First, they created a time-sharing system, a sort of precursor to modern operating systems that allowed more than one program to run on a single computer at the same time. They then designed BASIC to leverage this new mode of computing.
At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, two BASIC programs were compiled and executed simultaneously on a timeshared General Electric GE-225 mainframe. These two innovations—timesharing and a simple but powerful programming language—helped promote computing throughout Dartmouth and the rest of the world.
With the advent of personal computers, there was a need for a simple, portable, and user-friendly programming language. Once again, BASIC fit the bill. In 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen created a modified version of BASIC to run on the MITS Altair 8080. Altair BASIC, as it came to be called, was Microsoft’s first product. A year later, Steve Wozniak created Integer BASIC for the Apple I and II computers.
What Made BASIC a Great Programming Language at the Time?There are certain features of the BASIC programming language that made it the most widely used language of the 1970s and 1980s, including:
Simplicity: BASIC was a simple, accessible language that non-technical people could use to write code. Keywords were in plain English and the code syntax was relatively easy to understand. BASIC was much easier to use than Fortran which it was based upon. Free and Open-Source: While open-source programming languages are more or less the norm today, BASIC came out at a time when it was rare to release software free of charge. The makers decided to distribute it for free to encourage widespread use, which turned out to be a very effective strategy. Because it was free and open-source, home computers released at the time often came with a preloaded BASIC variant. Interactive Nature: The original BASIC language was compiled rather than interpreted and this made it a much faster language than later implementations. Also, due to timesharing, users could type BASIC code into a terminal directly, run it, and get results immediately. Tiny: When personal computing started to kick off, BASIC was the only language small enough to run on the limited memory available on computers of the time. For example, Altair BASIC took only 4KB of memory, leaving enough space for the interpreted program. BASIC’s Legacy and What It Inspired Microsoft""> Credit: MicrosoftBASIC continued to develop and spread at a rapid rate until the 1990s when hobby computing declined. More capable programming languages (such as Pascal and C) were needed to take advantage of the powerful computers now on the market.
While it’s declined in popularity, several BASIC dialects such as Visual Basic, QuickBASIC, and FreeBASIC are still in use today. Some of the dialects are “BASIC” in name only, but a few retain the ease of use and simplicity that made BASIC appealing to an entire generation of users.
You may have never heard of the language, but BASIC was quite influential in shaping the computing landscape we have today. It emphasized readability and simplicity, laying the foundation for modern, beginner-friendly programming languages like Python and Java.
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