BASIC was first successfully used to run programs on the school’s General Electric computer system at 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964. It was invented by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. They are shown in the photo below with one of their students.
BASIC is an acronym, standing for "Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code".
You can see the manual for this first version of BASIC here.I particularly like the section on the use of "teletype typewriters"! That first version had a very limited number of commands, including the infamous GOTO!
But, in my opinion, BASIC played a critical role in the Personal Computer revolution. Every computer came with some form of BASIC. My own first computer, an Apple II, came with "Integer BASIC" in ROM (written by the genius who is Steve Wozniak) and "Applesoft BASIC" (written my Microsoft) on cassette tape. And everyone who bought a person computer entered programs in BASIC (often transcribing them from books and magazines).
Without BASIC, what would have been fuelling this desire to write programs on your own computer? COBOL? Pascal? FORTRAN? Forth? Logo? ALGOL? Lisp? It's hard to imagine. (Java, by the way, wasn't to make an appearance until many years later in 1995)
And of course Assembler would be out of the question (too complex, and no practical ability to share code across different computers).
There is a nice video on this part of computer history on the Dartmouth website here.
