The next day I and my nerdy friends raided the library. We found 101 Games in BASIC, a book with code for making versions of checkers, Battleship, and the like. It was our Necronomicon. We’d heard about computer programming, of course, but never suspected it was something kids could do.
But BASIC? Holy crap. It seemed practically self-explanatory—commands like IF and THEN let you make logical decisions, INPUT let you ask a user a question and work with their response. This was programming that achieved a neat midpoint between the mind of a human and that of the machine.
This is why I’ve long argued that BASIC is the most consequential language in the history of computing. It’s a language for noobs, sure, but back then most everyone was a noob. Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, BASIC sent a shock wave through teenage tech culture. Kids who were lucky or privileged enough (or both) to gain access to computers that ran BASIC—the VIC-20, the Commodore 64, janky Sinclair boxes in the UK—immediately started writing games, text adventures, chatbots, databases. In the ’90s, they became the generation that built all the internet apps and code that made cyberspace mainstream. BASIC brought coding out of the ivory towers, and thereby tilted the world on its axis.
It’s hard to overstate how abstruse, before BASIC, most coding was. In the 1950s and ’60s you generally used machine language, which had commands like “sal 665” and “sal 667.” (Those tell the computer to move its accumulator, a crucial region of memory, right or left. Got it?)
A few early visionaries attempted to make languages for normies. In the 1950s, the pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper designed a language called FLOW-MATIC (a name whose badassery has yet to be outdone) that used plain-English-like commands such as IF EQUAL TO and READ-ITEM. Hopper wanted everyday businessfolk to be able to write—or at least read—code. Her innovations were later folded into COBOL, the language of banking and backend systems.
But it was BASIC that really blew the lid off. It was created in 1964 by John George Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, two math professors at Dartmouth College who figured—in a stance that presaged the Learn to Code movement of the 2010s—that coding ought to be something any liberal arts student could learn.