Back to BASIC--the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing

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 squat and angular box that glowed in the corner. "You gotta try this," he told me, and handed over a piece of paper on which he'd handwritten a program. I typed "RUN," hit Enter, and watched as my name spilled down the screen in bright green-on-black text, over and over. I had typed a couple of commands--ones that seemed easily understandable--and the machine had obeyed.