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.

For years, the lingua franca for desktop computers was the Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, a.k.a. Basic. Essentially every PC had it, and just about anyone could learn to program ...

For those of us old enough to remember the beginnings of the microcomputer revolution, we can look back fondly on ‘the programming environment is the OS,’ a ton of BASIC programs, and typing in small ...