BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use.
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16 Facts About BASIC
2.
BASIC was available for almost any system of the era, and became the de facto programming language for home computer systems that emerged in the late 1970s.
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3.
These PCs almost always had a BASIC interpreter installed by default, often in the machine's firmware or sometimes on a ROM cartridge.
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4.
BASIC declined in popularity in the 1990s, as more powerful microcomputers came to market and programming languages with advanced features became tenable on such computers.
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5.
The acronym BASIC comes from the name of an unpublished paper by Thomas Kurtz.
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6.
Emergence of BASIC took place as part of a wider movement towards time-sharing systems.
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7.
BASIC later collected a number of these into book form, 101 BASIC Computer Games, published in 1973.
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8.
Sinclair BASIC was introduced in 1980 with the Sinclair ZX80, and was later extended for the Sinclair ZX81 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
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9.
The BBC published BBC BASIC, developed by Acorn Computers Ltd, incorporating many extra structured programming keywords and advanced floating-point operation features.
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10.
Different magazines were published featuring programs for specific computers, though some BASIC programs were considered universal and could be used in machines running any variant of BASIC.
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11.
Many books of type-in programs were available, and in particular, Ahl published versions of the original 101 BASIC games converted into the Microsoft dialect and published it from Creative Computing as BASIC Computer Games.
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12.
Many versions of BASIC are now available for smartphones and tablets via the Apple App Store, or Google Play store for Android.
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13.
Variants of BASIC are available on graphing and otherwise programmable calculators made by Texas Instruments, HP, Casio, and others.
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14.
Minimal versions of BASIC had only integer variables and one- or two-letter variable names, which minimized requirements of limited and expensive memory.
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15.
Arrays in BASIC could contain integers, floating point or string variables.
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16.
Some dialects of BASIC supported matrices and matrix operations, which can be used to solve sets of simultaneous linear algebraic equations.
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