Invented by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, BASIC was first successfully ...

John G. Kemeny (left) and Thomas E. Kurtz made a truly Basic contribution to computer science in 1964. Courtesy Dartmouth Library __1964: __ In the predawn hours of May Day, two professors at ...

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.

Computers speak binary—long strings of 1s and 0s that tell them what to do. Some people can speak binary, too. As the joke goes: "There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand ...