Q–I used to like to write my own programs on MS-DOS-based computers using the QBasic programming language built into the operating system. I did this for the challenge rather than because I needed ...

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 ...

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 ...

People who got their first taste of IT during the microcomputer boom in the 1970s and 1980s almost certainly started by writing programs in Basic — or, at least, they debugged programs typed in from ...

That was almost 50 years ago; since then, Microsoft has embraced open-source software. In recent years, Microsoft has started ...

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 ...

Computer coding ability has gotten especially hip recently. People who can’t code revere it as 21st century sorcery, while those who do it professionally are often driven to fits by it. And it was 50 ...