If you are a certain age, your first programming language was almost certainly BASIC. You probably at least saw the famous book by Ahl, titled BASIC Computer Games or 101 BASIC Computer Games.

At first I was a little surprised. As I said, this is a smart person, but she did not know how to perform a task that's Basic Computing 101. Like a lot of people — some of whom have used ...

In this installment of my series on basic computer literacy (these Computing 101 columns run the last Tuesday of the month through September), I'll look at the ways you can get online.

Thomas E. Kurtz, a Dartmouth College professor who co-created the novice-friendly computer code known as Basic during the 1960s and helped make it the industry standard for programmers during the ...