BASIC, the programming language best known today for having the most "dialects" of derived programming languages, turned 60 this month. The original version of BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is also referred to as "Dartmouth BASIC", since its origins are with Dartmouth, a university based in New Hampshire. Naturally, it serves as the foundation point for dozens of later BASIC languages.
The original, Dartmouth BASIC launched in May 1964 and received updates and maintenance all the way up through 1979. In the times before BASIC and accessible programming languages like it, PCs were still machines that took up entire rooms and had to be programmed on a near case-by-case function to do much of anything. People say that BASIC "democratized" programming, and this is because besides being one of the first major programming languages, and it's actually one of the most accessible, too.
