Snippet: Fifty Years of BASIC ☇

Harry McCracken:

In the 1970s and early 1980s, when home computers came along, BASIC did as much as anything else to make them useful. Especially the multiple versions of the language produced by a small company named Microsoft. That’s when I was introduced to the language; when I was in high school, I was more proficient in it than I was in written English, because it mattered more to me. (I happen to have been born less than a month before BASIC was, which may or may not have anything to do with my affinity for it.)

I got my start with computers programming in BASIC on a Radio Shack TRS-80, which quickly gave way to an Apple IIGS. Once I started using Macs regularly, my interest and need to write my own programs diminished a bit, although I’d like to think that things like HTML, CSS, and PHP have taken its place.