Microsoft open-sourced Bill Gates’ 1976 6502 BASIC interpreter, showcasing early programming features and its historical role ...

Microsoft called the code—written by the company’s founder, Bill Gates, and its second-ever employee, Ric Weiland—”one of the most historically significant pieces of software from the early personal ...

Surely BASIC is properly obsolete by now, right? Perhaps not. In addition to inspiring a large part of home computing today, BASIC is still very much alive today, even outside of retro computing.

BBC Basic did a lot of things, and often quite well. During the early 1980s, it extended the BASIC languages with easier loop structures, like IF/THEN/ELSE, and ran faster than Microsoft's version. It ...