That was almost 50 years ago; since then, Microsoft has embraced open-source software. In recent years, Microsoft has started releasing some of its classic operating systems and programs as open ...

The Busy Beaver Challenge, a notoriously difficult question in theoretical computer science, is now producing answers so ...

Did you know that, between 1976 and 1978, Microsoft developed its own version of the BASIC programming language? It was initially called Altair BASIC before becoming Microsoft BASIC, and it was ...

In 1977, Commodore licensed BASIC for $25,000 as a one-time payment, securing perpetual use without royalties.

People who got their first taste of IT during the microcomputer boom in the 1970s and 1980s almost certainly started by writing programs in Basic — or, at least, they debugged programs typed in from ...

Knowing how to program a computer is good for you, and it’s a shame more people don’t learn to do it. For years now, that’s been a hugely popular stance. It’s led to educational initiatives as ...

Nowadays, "basic" has a very different and derogatory Urban Dictionary-style meaning. Fifty years ago on this very day, however, it was the name given to a new computer-programming language born in a ...