Microsoft open-sourced Bill Gates’ 1976 6502 BASIC interpreter, showcasing early programming features and its historical role in shaping personal computing.

"Rick Weiland and I (Bill Gates) wrote the 6502 BASIC," Gates commented on the Page Table blog in 2010. "I put the WAIT ...

Microsoft called the code—written by the company’s founder, Bill Gates, and its second-ever employee, Ric Weiland—”one of the ...

That was almost 50 years ago; since then, Microsoft has embraced open-source software. In recent years, Microsoft has started releasing some of its classic operating systems and programs as open ...

The Raspberry Pi is a fine machine that appears in many a retrocomputing project, but its custom Linux distribution lacks one thing. It boots into a GNU/Linux shell or a fully-featured desktop GUI ...

A few months after releasing the Altair BASIC source code, Microsoft has shared another cornerstone of its early software success. The company announced that 6502 BASIC ...

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.

Have I told you the story about Bill Gates and me in those early days of personal computing? To be clear: Bill Gates is older than I am. In 1975, as Bill was leaving Harvard to start Microsoft, I had ...

Do you, like me, recall playing with some of the first personal computers? Of course we had machine code and assembly language to work with, but the first “high-level” language of any note was some ...

The Commodore 64 emulator application for iPhone was pulled from the App Store by Apple in September for leaving its BASIC interpreter intact and accessible via a backdoor. This week the app has ...