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 ...

Surely BASIC is properly obsolete by now, right? Perhaps not. In addition to inspiring a large part of home computing today, BASIC is still very much alive today, even outside of retro computing.

Thomas E. Kurtz, who translated the exhilarating power of computer science in the 1960s as the coinventor of BASIC, a programming language that replaced inscrutable numbers and glyphs with intuitive ...