Since the 1960s, BASIC has introduced countless beginners to computer programming. Here's how the language got started, the paths it cleared for Windows and Apple, and where you can still find it ...

The pioneer of structured programming, Edsger Dijkstra, said in 1975, for example, that it was almost impossible to teach good programming to students who had previously come into contact with BASIC.

Now, BBC Basic is back and running on a whole mess of modern platforms. BBC Basic for SDL 2.0 will run on Windows, MacOS, x86 Linux, and even Raspberry Pi OS, Android, and iOS.