BASIC turns 53 – find out just how cool that is!

  • 3 May 2017
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3rd May 2017  by Paul Ducklin
 
                                           


 
The venerable BASIC programming language is 53 this week.
 
(If you reverse the decimal number 53, you get its hexadecimal equivalent 35 – and there aren’t many two digit numbers
  • with that property!)
     
    Strictly speaking, BASIC already existed by the start of 1964, but it was on 01 May 1964 that Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA, made it available interactively via its timesharing terminals.
     
    By “interactively”, we mean that you could sit down at a terminal, go into the BASIC environment and start programming as you went along, trying out commands one at a time, adding them into your program, running it, fixing bugs, running it again, tweaking it, saving it…
     
    …and then coming back later on and picking up where you left off.
     
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    Userlevel 7
    Rememer learning BASIC when at school, and it had not been out for that long (so I suppose that dates me, eh?). I have fond memories of using it for those silly and irrelevant programs that one creates when one is young...LOL :D

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