BASIC
Screenshot of Atari BASIC, one of the BASIC implementations used by the small and simple home computers of the early 1980s.
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| Paradigm | Unstructured, later procedural, later object-oriented |
|---|---|
| Designed by | John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz |
| First appeared | May 1, 1964 |
| Major implementations | |
| Dartmouth BASIC, Apple BASIC, Atari BASIC, Sinclair BASIC, Commodore BASIC, BBC BASIC, TI-BASIC, Casio BASIC, Microsoft BASIC, Liberty BASIC, Visual Basic, FreeBASIC, PowerBASIC, Gambas | |
| Influenced by | |
| ALGOL 60, FORTRAN II, JOSS | |
| Influenced | |
| COMAL, Visual Basic, Visual Basic .NET, Realbasic, GRASS, AutoIt, AutoHotkey | |
BASIC (an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use. In 1964, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz designed the original BASIC language at Dartmouth College in the U.S. state of New Hampshire. They wanted to enable students in fields other than science and mathematics to use computers. At the time, nearly all use of computers required writing custom software, which was something only scientists and mathematicians tended to learn.
Versions of BASIC became widespread on microcomputers in the mid-1970s and 1980s. Microcomputers usually shipped with BASIC, often in the machine's firmware. Having an easy-to-learn language on these early personal computers allowed small business owners, professionals, hobbyists, and consultants to develop custom software on computers they could afford. In the 2010s, BASIC remains popular in many computing dialects and in new languages influenced by BASIC, such as Microsoft's Visual Basic.
Before the mid-1960s, the only computers were huge mainframe computers. Users submitted jobs (calculations or other requests) on punched cards or similar media to specialist computer operators. The computer stored these, then used a batch processing system to run this queue of jobs one after another, allowing very high levels of utilization of these expensive machines. As the performance of computing hardware rose through the 1960s, multi-processing was developed. This allowed a mix of batch jobs to be run together, but the real revolution was the development of time-sharing. Time-sharing allowed multiple remote interactive users to share use of the computer, interacting with the computer from computer terminals with keyboards and teletype printers, and later display screens, in much the same way as desktop computers or personal computers would be used later.
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