[Tech] Il BASIC compie 40 anni

Il linguaggio BASIC entra negli "anta", ma tutto sommato li porta abbastanza bene: attualmente al mondo ci sono più di 300 differenti "dialetti" del linguaggio BASIC, presenti praticamente su quasi tutte le piattaforme e i sistemi operativi.



Il primo successo commerciale di Microsoft fu proprio una versione per microcomputer del BASIC; gli attuali Visual Basic e VBA (Visual Basic for Applications, il linguaggio di programmazione interno della suite Office) sono (lontani) discendenti dell'MS BASIC originario.



Da un articolo su Excite News:

10 PRINT "In 1963 two Dartmouth College math professors had a radical"



20 PRINT "idea - create a computer language muscular enough to harness"



30 PRINT "the power of the period's computers, yet simple enough that even"



40 PRINT "the school's janitors could use it."



50 END



A year later on May 1, 1964, the BASIC computer programing language (as demonstrated above) was born and for the first time computers were taken out of the lab and brought into the community.



Forty years later pure BASIC - Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code - has all but disappeared, but its legacy lives on.



"This is the birth of personal computing," said Arthur Luehrmann, a former Dartmouth physics professor who is writing a book about BASIC's development at the university. "It was personal computing before people knew what personal computing was."

Link: Excite News.