BASIC was designed at Dartmouth College in 1964 by mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz to give ordinary students, not just engineers, a way to use the computer. The earliest manual, dated October 1, 1964 and stamped “Copyright 1964 by the Trustees of Dartmouth College,” spells out the goal in the name itself: BASIC stands for “Beginner’s All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code,” a language meant to be “at the same time precise, simple, and easy to understand.” Its development was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant NSF GE 3864.
The language was built around two ideas that would define a generation of programming. First, line numbers: the 1964 manual explains that “all lines in the program start with a line number,” and that “these serve to identify the lines in the program, each one of which is called a statement; thus a program is made up of statements.” Second, simple control flow: the GOTO statement let a programmer “interrupt the normal sequence of executing statements in the increasing order of their line numbers.” A beginner could type a few numbered lines, jump around with GOTO, and run the program immediately.
The fourth edition of January 1968 keeps the same spirit, presenting itself as “A Manual for BASIC, the elementary algebraic language designed for use with the Dartmouth Time Sharing System.” BASIC was inseparable from time-sharing: Dartmouth students sat at teletypes connected to a central machine and got results back in seconds, an interactive style very different from the batch decks of FORTRAN.
That accessibility is exactly why BASIC outlived its university origins. When microcomputers arrived a decade later with tiny memories and no software, a small, easy-to-implement interactive language was perfect. BASIC interpreters were squeezed into ROM on machine after machine, and for millions of people in the late 1970s and 1980s the words “Ok” or “READY” from a BASIC prompt were the first thing a computer ever said to them. The line-numbered, GOTO-driven dialect that Kemeny and Kurtz sketched in 1964 became, by accident of history, the common tongue of the personal computer.