Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That’s when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the ...

Long before you were picking up Python and JavaScript, in the predawn darkness of May 1, 1964, a modest but pivotal moment in computing history unfolded at Dartmouth College. Mathematicians John G.

60 years ago, the inventors of the BASIC programming language actually achieved what they had hoped for: simple programming that is accessible to everyone. At 4:00 a.m. on May 1, 1964, the first BASIC ...

I was entering the miseries of seventh grade in the fall of 1980 when a friend dragged me into a dimly lit second-floor room. The school had recently installed a newfangled Commodore PET computer, a ...

Thomas Eugene Kurtz, a pioneer in computer science whose vision of accessible computing transformed education and technology, passed away on 12 November at the age of 96. Kurtz’s enduring ...

BASIC, a programming language that first appeared on May 1, 1964, celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2024. With the grant, Kemeny and his team opened up their BASIC prototype to everyone at Dartmouth, ...

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 ...

Thomas E. Kurtz, a pioneering mathematician at Dartmouth College and an inventor of the simplified computer programming language known as BASIC, which allowed students to easily operate early ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. At the start of the 1960s, when most computers occupied an entire room, the world’s programmers could barely ...