Microsoft has open sourced GW-BASIC, a programming language developed some 38 years ago. GW-BASIC and variants such as QBasic, QuickBasic and others provided the onramp to computer programming for ...

Once upon a time, knowing how to use a computer was virtually synonymous with knowing how to program one. And the thing that made it possible was a programming language called BASIC.

Microsoft’s GW-BASIC is a programming language that was released in 1983 and bundled with MS-DOS on early PCs. It was the first programming language many students and developers learned in the ...

Microsoft’s GW-BASIC is a programming language that was released in 1983 and bundled with MS-DOS on early PCs. It was the first programming language many students and developers learned in the ...

I've got some old industrial engineering programs that someone wrote in GW-BASIC (probably when I was about 5.) I need to get them running in Win2000.GW-BASIC always locks up when I try to run the ...

The new product extended GW-BASIC with more graphics support, better structuring, and - at last - a compiler. Developers could now produce EXE files, greatly improving performance.

There were other versions, of course, especially for very small computers, but the gold standard for home computer Basic was Microsoft’s version, known then as GW-Basic.

This is why I’ve long argued that BASIC is the most consequential language in the history of computing. It’s a language for noobs, sure, but back then most everyone was a noob.