People who got their first taste of IT during the microcomputer boom in the 1970s and 1980s almost certainly started by writing programs in Basic — or, at least, they debugged programs typed in from ...

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.

That was almost 50 years ago; since then, Microsoft has embraced open-source software. In recent years, Microsoft has started releasing some of its classic operating systems and programs as open ...