May 1 is BASIC day

John Biggs

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

On this day in 1964 John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz ran the first BASIC program. Designed to be an easy-to-use programming language for students, BASIC has stood the test of time and is probably the first language many of us mastered in our early geek years. The two also created the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, which is pretty much the basis for every multi-user operating system in existence. Thank you, Mssrs. Kemeny and Kurtz. Without you many of us wouldn’t have jobs.

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