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 ...

Microcontrollers existed before the Arduino, and a device that anyone could program and blink an LED existed before the first Maker Faire. This might come as a surprise to some, but for others PICs ...

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 ...

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.

Nowadays, "basic" has a very different and derogatory Urban Dictionary-style meaning. Fifty years ago on this very day, however, it was the name given to a new computer-programming language born in a ...

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 ...

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 ...

Knowing how to program a computer is good for you, and it’s a shame more people don’t learn to do it. For years now, that’s been a hugely popular stance. It’s led to educational initiatives as ...