BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code)BASIC refers to a system developed at Dartmouth College in 1963-64, originally implemented for the G. E. 225. It was intended to be easy both to learn and to translate, and to be a bridge to more complex computer languages.
John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz designed BASIC at Dartmouth for the school's experimental system. It was designed for quick and easy programming by novices. At that time, punched card and paper tape were the principal methods of input/output, and the computers themselves were many times larger than today's PCs or Macs.
Originally BASIC was available only in interpreted versions, mostly running on mainframes. Other versions appeared as the personal computer gained popularity and acceptance with the general public. By the mid-1980s, hundreds of personal computers had been built, nearly all of which included some dialect of BASIC on ROM. But the versions of BASIC were all different, and many disappeared from the marketplace.
In the 1970s Paul Allen, then a Honeywell employee, asked an old classmate, Bill Gates (who was a Harvard undergrad at the time), to help him design a BASIC language for MIT's personal computer. The pair developed it, licensed their version of BASIC to MIT, then ported it to various platforms, before moving back to the Seattle area and founding Microsoft.