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. This interview with one of the lecturers explains where BASIC came from and how the first coding class came about.