BASIC

BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1964. They wanted to enable students in non-scientific fields to use computers. At the time, nearly all computers required writing custom software, which only scientists and mathematicians tended to learn. Wikipedia

Created Year: 1964
Designed by: Mary Kenneth Keller
Developed by: Mary Kenneth Keller • John George Kemeny • Thomas E. Kurtz
Aliases: Symbolic Instruction Code, BASIC programming language, Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
File extensions: bas

Wikidata: Q42979

Influenced: Altair BASIC • BasicX • BBC BASIC • CBASIC • COMAL • DIBOL • Euphoria • GFA BASIC • GRASS • IBM Advanced BASIC • Open Programming Language • Perl • PureBasic • QuickBASIC • Ring • Ruby • STOS BASIC • True BASIC • WLanguage • XBasic • XProfan • Zebra

Influenced by: ALGOL • Fortran • JOSS

Programming paradigms: procedural programming • non-structured programming • object-oriented programming • imperative programming

Language types: imperative programming language • non-structured programming language

BASIC Influence Network

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Hello World in BASIC

10 PRINT "Hello World"
20 END

Free BASIC books, articles, documentation

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Latest data update: 2026-07-13