60 years of BASIC: General-purpose programming language for beginners

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At 4:00 a.m. on May 1, 1964, the first BASIC interpreter was launched on a mainframe computer at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The BASIC programming language, developed by professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, revolutionized access to programming in the following decades.

The first BASIC program

10 Let X = (7+8)/3
20 PRINT X
30 END

The first version of the language had 14 commands (including PRINT, LET, IF, THEN, FOR, NEXT, GOTO, INPUT and END).

Simple programming language for beginners

With BASIC, Kemeny and Kurtz wanted to create a programming language that even non-computer scientists could learn quickly. In contrast to languages commonly used at the time, such as FORTRAN or Algol, BASIC was intended to make do with just a few English-language commands.

The first program, which ran on the night of 1 May 1964, was still quite manageable at 90 lines. The first version of BASIC only contained a handful of commands such as LET, PRINT and GOTO as well as a few mathematical functions. Despite this simplicity, BASIC caught on in the following years and was ported to numerous mini and microcomputers.

Breakthrough with home computers

BASIC began its triumphal march in the late 1970s, when the first home computers from companies such as Apple, Acorn, Commodore, Sinclair and Tandy came onto the market. The computers offered BASIC in their firmware, which made it easier to start programming. A small company called Micro-Soft played an important role at the time with extended BASIC dialects. In 1975, Bill Gates developed a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800, one of the first home computers.

At the beginning of the 1980s, IBM also wanted a BASIC embedded in the BIOS; this is how Microsoft got into business with IBM, sold IBM an operating system at the same time and thus grew into a software giant. The two BASIC creators, Kemery and Kurtz, also went back to the drawing board and launched "True BASIC" on the market in 1983. However, this also led to a fragmentation of BASIC into numerous dialects. Many manufacturers developed their own BASIC variants in order to circumvent Microsoft licenses.

Competition from modern languages

In the 1980s and 1990s, BASIC was increasingly displaced by more powerful and structured programming languages such as Pascal, C and C++. Critics criticized the often confusing BASIC code. The pioneer of structured programming, Edsger Dijkstra, said in 1975, for example, that it was almost impossible to teach good programming to students who had previously come into contact with BASIC.

"Conceptually and in terms of efficiency, BASIC could not keep up with other programming languages," says Jochen Viehoff, computer historian at the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum (HNF) in Paderborn. "Critics also repeatedly made fun of the confusing 'spaghetti code'", which BASIC virtually provoked due to the jump command for program flow control GOTO. In the case of Visual Basic, which has been able to compete with languages previously considered superior since .NET at the latest, others criticized the fact that it had never really been able to break away from the Microsoft Windows platform.

It was only with the introduction of Microsoft's object-oriented programming language and development environment Visual Basic in the early 1990s, which was intended to drastically accelerate the development of Windows programs (keyword: rapid application development), that Visual Basic made a comeback of sorts, which is still used today in Office products, for example in macro programming. From 2002, Visual Basic was converted to the .NET runtime library. The last community version dates back to 2022.

BASIC lives on in the retro computer scene

Even though professional programmers hardly use BASIC today, the language is still very popular in the retrocomputing scene. BASIC programs are still being developed on old systems such as the C64 or the Apple II. The simple hardware proximity makes it possible to understand how the computers work.

BASIC inventor Thomas Kurtz foresaw this as early as 1964: "Our intention is not to train professional programmers, but to give all students experience and a basic understanding of how to use a computer." Nomen est omen: BASIC stands for Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Even 60 years later, the programming language still lives up to this claim.

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