The University of Massachusetts’ alcohol and drug prevention program, BASICS, received national recognition this summer and a grant for $199,120 from the Department of Education’s Drug and Alcohol ...

Surely BASIC is properly obsolete by now, right? Perhaps not. In addition to inspiring a large part of home computing today, BASIC is still very much alive today, even outside of retro computing.

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 ...