Nowadays, "basic" has a very different and derogatory Urban Dictionary-style meaning. Fifty years ago on this very day, however, it was the name given to a new computer-programming language born in a ...

Why it matters: There's a good chance you cut your coding teeth on BASIC if you took a computer class back in the 20th century. The Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code celebrated its 60th ...

Surely BASIC is properly obsolete by now, right? Perhaps not. In addition to inspiring a large part of home computing today, BASIC is still very much alive today, even outside of retro computing.

Thomas E. Kurtz, who translated the exhilarating power of computer science in the 1960s as the coinventor of BASIC, a programming language that replaced inscrutable numbers and glyphs with intuitive ...