Getting back to BASIC

If you have ever tried to code something using a user-friendly, high-level programming language, you are inheriting a world shaped in large part by the development of BASIC – the first attempt to make computing accessible to non-specialists. While it has declined in popularity over the past 30 years as personal computers increased in power such that C++, and now Python, became more versatile alternatives, although BASIC remains a useful and still the simplest programming language to learn. Its immediate successor, Visual Basic (VBA) lives on and is sustained by the prevalence of Microsoft Office, which runs on this programming language, and the .NET (VB.NET) programming framework. So, while the flat BASIC code familiar to anyone who grew up learning to programme an old BBC microcomputer may be dated (though still useful – old code lives on buried in so many current applications), it has evolved into what remains a simple, fast coding language in wide use to this day.

BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) remains the simplest programming language, first used at Dartmoor College, New England in 1963, to teach Humanities students and other non-mathematicians to code, and specifically to build a time-sharing programme for mainframe time-sharing. This was back in the day when powerful computers filled a room, and people queued up for time to use it for advanced computational calculations – much as they continue to do today for modern supercomputers, telescopes, and other expensive and rare pieces of shared technology.

Watch this charming video interview with one of the surviving educators from Dartmouth discussing the world’s first mass coding education come hackathon back in 1963.

Feeling nostalgic or simply interested in experiencing what 1980s computing was like? Try one of these free BBC computer emulators.