This is why I’ve long argued that BASIC is the most consequential language in the history of computing. It’s a language for noobs, sure, but back then most everyone was a noob.

If you are a certain age, your first programming language was almost certainly BASIC. You probably at least saw the famous book by Ahl, titled BASIC Computer Games or 101 BASIC Computer Games.

Universities are no strangers to innovating with technology. EdTech wouldn’t exist if that weren’t true. But colleges were truly at the forefront when it came to the development of computer science.

The language that made that all possible. They called it the Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code— BASIC. Before BASIC, life in the computer programming world was complicated.

50 years ago today, the BASIC computer language was born as two math professors from Dartmouth College used it to help run the school's computer system for the first time.

Four sounds like an awful lot of languages to learn for a beginner, but the idea is to get a broad understanding of programming and the basics down. As for which programming language to learn first?

Thomas E. Kurtz, a pioneering mathematician at Dartmouth College and an inventor of the simplified computer programming language known as BASIC, which allowed students to easily operate early ...

The programming language, developed five decades ago, didn't require code to be entered on punch cards. It also allowed computer novices to begin programming without a lot of academic training.

Because BASIC is the first language that many computer scientists learn, it has been, for generations, a mother tongue of technologists.

In 1964, scientists at Dartmouth College ran the very first computer program written in BASIC, which ushered in a new era of computing.

Long before the days of laptops and smartphones, Thomas E. Kurtz worked to give more students access to computers. That work helped propel generations into a new world. Kurtz has died at 96.