Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That’s when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the ...

Computer coding ability has gotten especially hip recently. People who can’t code revere it as 21st century sorcery, while those who do it professionally are often driven to fits by it. And it was 50 ...

Long before you were picking up Python and JavaScript, in the predawn darkness of May 1, 1964, a modest but pivotal moment in computing history unfolded at Dartmouth College. Mathematicians John G.

Humans seem to have a need to do things that aren’t practical. Make the biggest ball of twine. Engrave the Declaration of Independence on a grain of rice. We want to make things bigger, smaller, ...

Microsoft open-sourced the MS-BASIC language. Bill Gates would never have seen this coming back in the day. MS-BASIC 1.1 was many developers' first language. In 1976, they rebranded Altair BASIC to ...

Today we are very used to running a rich variety of operating systems and programs on our mobile devices, from Office on a Windows laptop to a game on our Android smartphones, we are accustomed to ...

60 years ago, the inventors of the BASIC programming language actually achieved what they had hoped for: simple programming that is accessible to everyone. At 4:00 a.m. on May 1, 1964, the first BASIC ...

A few days ago, I ran into an online post where someone pointed out the book “Learn to Program with Assembly” and asked if anyone had ever learned assembly language as a first programming language. I ...