50 Years of BASIC, the Language That Made Computers Personal

Posted by timothy on Tuesday April 29, 2014 @03:34AM from the goto-10*5 dept.

harrymcc (1641347) writes "On May 1, 1964 at 4 a.m. in a computer room at Dartmouth University, the first programs written in BASIC ran on the university's brand-new time-sharing system. With these two innovations, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz didn't just make it easier to learn how to program a computer: They offered Dartmouth students a form of interactive, personal computing years before the invention of the PC. Over at TIME.com, I chronicle BASIC's first 50 years with a feature with thoughts from Kurtz, Microsoft's Paul Allen and many others."

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Re:In 3, 2, 1... by NapalmV · 2014-04-29 05:28 · Score: 0, Troll

Wirth acknowledged the modularity failings of Pascal in his Modula language family, but by that time he had missed the bus.
Interesting that it "missed the bus" on "modularity" issues against two languages that didn't even have the behavior of the modulo (%) operator properly defined and standardized until late in 1999 (C) and 2011 (C++) respectively.