#SHORTS - BASIC PROGRAMMING | 58 YEARS OLD PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE | MICROSOFT QBASIC | InterviewDOT
Channel: Interview DOT
Date: 2022-05-27

Click here - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd0U_xlQxdZynq09knDszXA?sub_confirmation=1 to get notifications.

#SHORTS - BASIC | Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code | QBASIC Microsoft | InterviewDOT

BASIC is an imperative programming language . It was initially developed in 1964 by John G. Kemeny , Thomas E. Kurtz and Mary Kenneth Keller at Dartmouth College as an educational programming language . In its form at that time it did not yet have the features of structured programming , but worked with line numbers and jump commands GOTO . There are now a large number of different BASIC dialects , some of the more recent ones having all the elements of high-level programming languages, such as object orientation . 

The acronym BASIC stands for B eginner's A ll -purpose S ymbolic Instruction C ode, which means "general-purpose symbolic programming language for beginners". The abbreviation seen as a word also means "basic". This clearly shows the design goal: to create a simple programming language suitable for beginners. Except in some product names, the word "BASIC" is always capitalized. 

BASIC was developed by John G. Kemeny , Thomas E. Kurtz , and Mary Kenneth Keller at Dartmouth College in 1964 to make it easier for electrical engineering students to get started with programming over Algol and Fortran . On May 1, 1964 at 4 a.m. local time, New Hampshire, the first two BASIC programs were running simultaneously on a General Electric GE-225 computerin the basement of Dartmouth College. BASIC was then developed further for many years by incoming computer science students at that college, and from the late 1960s Kemeny and Kurtz promoted it to several area schools that wanted to include computer courses in their curriculum for the first time. According to the wishes of its "fathers", BASIC was free for schools, in contrast to almost all other programming languages ​​in use at the time, which usually cost several thousand dollars. Many of the large computer manufacturers of the time such as DEC soon offered BASIC interpreters for their new minicomputers because the language was easy to learn and could be used free of license feesat; many medium-sized companies, which at that time purchased large numbers of computers for the first time, came into contact with BASIC in this way. 2 

Some of the high school, college, and middle-class programmers so familiar with BASIC were later active in and popularizing the short-lived hobby computer scene of the mid-1970s that preceded commercial microcomputers ; Hardly any other high-level language that was widespread at the time was as suitable as a slimmed down BASIC for the extremely limited memory space of these first microcomputers. BASIC experienced its peak in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the first home computers , which emerged from the handicraft computers, almost all of which had a BASIC interpreter as a user interface and programming environment . Prominent examples are Sinclair computersthe ZX series with Sinclair-Basic ZX80 , ZX81 and ZX Spectrum , the Acorn BBC Micro , the Tandy TRS-80 , the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A , the Schneider/Amstrad CPC , the Apple II , the Atari 8 -bit home computer , or the best-selling home computer of all time, the Commodore 64 . But also the forerunners of personal computers, such as those from Philips , could interpret or compile with CP/M -BASIC. The vast majority of these BASICs came from Microsoft. BASIC was Microsoft's first and most important product in the early years, several years before the company's first operating system , MS-DOS , was released.

At that time, practically all owners of home computers had at least a basic knowledge of BASIC, since most computers started the BASIC interpreter when they were switched on, which allowed other programs to be loaded using BASIC commands. Even when graphical user interfaces with the Macintosh , Amiga and the Atari ST were introduced in the mid-1980s, BASIC interpreters continued to be supplied with them. There were also additional commercially available versions of BASIC dialects. Using compilers , some BASIC dialects could be converted directly into much faster machine programstranslated or translated directly into call lists of the underlying interpreter functions, bypassing the interpreter. MS-DOS , which has been in use since 1981 , also contained a BASIC interpreter - initially BASICA or GW-BASIC , later QBasic - which played a role in computer science  teaching at many schools in Germany . At this time, however, a change began because other high-level languages ​​such as C for home computers became available or the resources of the respective system were only inadequately supported by the BASIC interpreter supplied, which forced the programmer to learn assemblerto familiarize.