For years, the lingua franca for desktop computers was the Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, a.k.a. Basic. Essentially every PC had it, and just about anyone could learn to program ...

For three years — ever since my son Ben was in fifth grade — he and I have engaged in a quixotic but determined quest: We’ve searched for a simple and straightforward way to get the introductory ...

60 years ago, the inventors of the BASIC programming language actually achieved what they had hoped for: simple programming that is accessible to everyone. At 4:00 a.m. on May 1, 1964, the first BASIC ...

For those of us old enough to remember the beginnings of the microcomputer revolution, we can look back fondly on ‘the programming environment is the OS,’ a ton of BASIC programs, and typing in small ...