In computer programming, BASIC (an acronym for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of high-level programming languages. The original BASIC was designed in 1964 by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA to provide computer access to non-science students. At the time, nearly all use of computers required writing custom software, which was something only scientists and mathematicians tended to do. The language and its variants became widespread on microcomputers in the late 1970s and 1980s. BASIC remains popular to this day in a handful of highly modified dialects and new languages influenced by BASIC such as Microsoft Visual Basic. As of 2006, 59% of developers for the .NET platform used Visual Basic .NET as their only language.

Screenshot of Atari BASIC, an early BASIC language for small computers

BASIC

Paradigm	unstructured, later procedural, later object-oriented
Appeared in	1964 (1964)
Designed by	John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz
Typing discipline	strong
Major implementations	Apple BASIC, Commodore BASIC, Microsoft BASIC, BBC BASIC, TI-BASIC
Influenced by	ALGOL 60, FORTRAN II, JOSS
Influenced	COMAL, Visual BASIC, Visual Basic .NET, Realbasic, REXX, Perl, GRASS

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