Why Is A 1964 Programming Language Still Inside Microsoft Excel?

If you ever typed 10 PRINT "HELLO" and 20 GOTO 10 on a computer in a department store and walked away, you were using BASIC, a language two Dartmouth professors created in 1964 and gave away. This is the story of BASIC. It begins with John Kemeny, a teenage refugee from Budapest who fed punched cards into IBM machines at Los Alamos and later worked as Albert Einstein's assistant, and Thomas Kurtz, who wanted a name that was "simple but not simple-minded." At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall, Kemeny and a student typed RUN on neighboring terminals, and time-sharing and BASIC were born. From there it went to GE time-sharing, HP and DEC minicomputers, David Ahl's BASIC Computer Games, a Teletype bought with rummage sale money at Lakeside School, and the Altair BASIC that Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote before they owned an Altair. Then came the Open Letter to Hobbyists, Applesoft, Commodore's WAIT 6502,1 easter egg, Dijkstra's "mentally mutilated," True BASIC, Visual Basic and the VBA that still runs inside Excel. What was the first program you ever wrote in BASIC, and what machine was it on? Tell me in the comments. And if I got a date, a number or a name wrong, tell me there too. I read every comment and I pin corrections. Watch the Fortran story: https://youtu.be/6hMGCG4TvN0 Watch the Visual Basic 6 story: https://youtu.be/QhEHAlUzUh8 Parts That Changed History tells the stories behind the chips, machines and parts that shaped the modern world, and the people who built them. Subscribe for a new story every day. SOURCES Dartmouth College, "BASIC Begins at Dartmouth" (BASIC at 50) and "BASIC at 50," Dartmouth Computer Science, 2014 Computer History Museum, "In Memoriam: Thomas E. Kurtz, 1928-2024" IEEE Computer Society, Computer Pioneers: John George Kemeny Dartmouth Mathematics, Kemeny history: "Roots" Edsger W. Dijkstra, EWD498, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" June 18, 1975 Bill Gates, "An Open Letter to Hobbyists," 1976 TIOBE Index, May 2026 Wikipedia: Dartmouth BASIC; BASIC; John G. Kemeny; Thomas E. Kurtz; Altair BASIC; An Open Letter to Hobbyists; Applesoft BASIC; Commodore BASIC; BASIC Computer Games; Microsoft BASIC; Bill Gates #BASIC #ComputerHistory #Programming