On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the basic valentine’s day gifts across from the article title. BASIC programs simultaneously on remote terminals.

The emergence of microcomputers in the mid-1970s led to the development of multiple BASIC dialects, including Microsoft BASIC in 1975. Due to the tiny main memory available on these machines, often 4 KB, a variety of Tiny BASIC dialects were also created. Kemeny was the math department chairman at Dartmouth College. Based largely on his reputation as an innovator in math teaching, in 1959 the school won an Alfred P. 500,000 to build a new department building. These did not progress past a single freshman class.

Is it ‘1, 10, 2’ or ‘1, 2, 10’, and is the comma after the line number required or not? Kemeny wrote the first version of BASIC. The acronym BASIC comes from the name of an unpublished paper by Thomas Kurtz. DO was instead indicated by the NEXT I. These changes made the language much less idiosyncratic while still having an overall structure and feel similar to the original FORTRAN.

Initially, BASIC concentrated on supporting straightforward mathematical work, with matrix arithmetic support from its initial implementation as a batch language, and character string functionality being added by 1965. Wanting use of the language to become widespread, its designers made the compiler available free of charge. New Hampshire recognized the accomplishment in 2019 when it erected a highway historical marker in Hanover describing the creation of “the first user-friendly programming language”. The emergence of BASIC took place as part of a wider movement towards time-sharing systems. First conceptualized during the late 1950s, the idea became so dominant in the computer industry by the early 1960s that its proponents were speaking of a future in which users would “buy time on the computer much the same way that the average household buys power and water from utility companies”.

General Electric, having worked on the Dartmouth project, wrote their own underlying operating system and launched an online time-sharing system known as Mark I. It featured BASIC as one of its primary selling points. Although time-sharing services with BASIC were successful for a time, the widespread success predicted earlier was not to be. The emergence of minicomputers during the same period, and especially low-cost microcomputers in the mid-1970s, allowed anyone to purchase and run their own systems rather than buy online time which was typically billed at dollars per minute.