Computer coding ability has gotten especially hip recently. People who can’t code revere it as 21st century sorcery, while those who do it professionally are often driven to fits by it. And it was 50 ...

I was entering the miseries of seventh grade in the fall of 1980 when a friend dragged me into a dimly lit second-floor room. The school had recently installed a newfangled Commodore PET computer, a ...

At Dartmouth, long before the days of laptops and smartphones, he worked to give more students access to computers. That work helped propel generations into a new world. By Kenneth R. Rosen Thomas E.

Can you believe it? The BASIC programming language is 50 years old this month. As you may know, BASIC was created in 1964 by Dartmouth College professors John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz as a system to ...

For years, the lingua franca for desktop computers was the Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, a.k.a. Basic. Essentially every PC had it, and just about anyone could learn to program ...

Imagine if UCLA offered a course in building doghouses. With only 10 weeks, you would expect the class to teach students the basics needed to produce a final product – maybe focusing on how to sketch ...