John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz created BASIC at Dartmouth College in 1964.
BASIC stands for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Kemeny and Kurtz designed it to make computer programming accessible to students outside technical and mathematics courses. The first version ran on Dartmouth’s General Electric GE-225 system through a time-sharing environment.
BASIC became especially important when microcomputers reached homes and schools in the 1970s and 1980s. Microsoft BASIC, released for early personal computers, helped make the language widely available, although it was one of many later dialects.
BASIC is not the same language as Fortran, which IBM developed for scientific computing, or Pascal, which Niklaus Wirth designed for structured programming education. Its defining historical role was lowering the entry barrier for interactive programming.