BASIC Full Form is Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. BASIC is one of the simplest and earliest high-level programming language supports in all operating systems. John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz designed the original BASIC language at Dartmouth College. They wanted to enable students in fields other than science and mathematics to use computers. At the time, nearly all use of computers required writing custom software, which was something only scientists and mathematicians tended to learn.
The aim was that all students should be able to use computers in every field. Some time ago for using the computer, custom software is required which was not easy to learn for ordinary people. After the arrival of BASIC, people started developing custom software on their workers’ computers for their business profession etc. In today’s time, BASIC is used only to teach the basic principles of programming.
It uses numbers like 10, 20, 30 at the beginning of each line to process instructions. QuickBasic is a Compiler for BASIC developed by Microsoft in 1985 which runs mainly on DOS.
BASIC fell from use during the later 1980s as newer machines with far greater capabilities came to market and other programming languages (such as Pascal and C) became tenable. In 1991, Microsoft released Visual Basic, combining a greatly updated version of BASIC with a visual forms builder. This reignited use of the language and “VB” remains a major programming language in the form of VB.NET.
Versions Of Basic
Earlier versions:
- QB64
- FreeBASIC
- RapidQ
- Basic For QT
- Gambas
Modern versions:
- PureBasic
- PowerBASIC
- Xojo
- Monkey X
- True BASIC
Origin Of BASIC
John G. Kemeny was the math department chairman at Dartmouth College, and largely on his reputation as an innovator in math teaching, in 1959 the school won an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation award for $500,000 to build a new department building.
Thomas E. Kurtz had joined the department in 1956, and from the 1960s they agreed on the need for programming literacy among students outside the traditional STEM fields. Kemeny later noted that Our vision was that every student on campus should have access to a computer, and any faculty member should be able to use a computer in the classroom whenever appropriate. It was as simple as that.
Kemeny wrote the first version of BASIC. The acronym BASIC comes from the name of an unpublished paper by Thomas Kurtz. The first version BASIC language was released on 1 May 1964. They also made it available to high schools in the Hanover, New Hampshire area and put considerable effort into promoting the language. In the following years, as other dialects of BASIC appeared, Kemeny and Kurtz’s original BASIC dialect became known as Dartmouth BASIC.
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