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Comment by krylon | Hacker News Reader

Like so many, I gathered my first experiences with programming in Basic (or is it BASIC?). My first computer was a Commodore 128, and my mother sent to a week-long programming course that for some reason the local Sparkasse (quasi-public bank in Germany) held over the Easter holidays

And here we used PCs running DOS, so I almost certainly did my first baby steps programming using GW-BASIC. Little did I know the Basic on my C128 had also been written by Microsoft. Ah, to be that young again...

I expect Microsoft is not going to get many PRs, but it's a nice gesture. One day, some digital archeologist is going to have fun (or curse like a sailor) inspecting this code.

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It is supposed to be "BASIC", from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code no less [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC

I knew that it used to stand for that (and as an acronym should be upper-case), but I thought they maybe dropped that somewhere along the way.

Fortran and Cobol used to be "FORTRAN" and "COBOL", too, but once systems with support for upper- and lowercase-letters became widespread, they went mixed-case.

I recall there was some debate if the name BASIC had been intended as an acronym initially, but in time, evidence (AFAIR, anyway) tended to support the claim is was an acronym from the very beginning. (-:

Dartmouth celebrated the 50th anniversary of BASIC a few years ago and they were pretty consistent in keeping it all upper case.

https://www.dartmouth.edu/basicfifty/basic.html

True BASIC, a company that Kemeny and Kurtz founded in 1983, is all upper case too.

https://www.truebasic.com/about

Well, Happy Birthday BASIC!

Love it or hate it, BASIC has left a footprint in the IT world that few languages could match.

> Fortran and Cobol used to be "FORTRAN" and "COBOL", too, but once systems with support for upper- and lowercase-letters became widespread, they went mixed-case

COBOL is still “COBOL” (at least per the IBM page on the language and the ISO/IEC 1989:2014 standard for the language.

My bad then. Thank you for pointing that out.

I suspect they'll get zero PRs:

"The files in this repo are for historical reference only and will remain read-only and unmodified in their original state.

Please do not send Pull Requests suggesting any modifications to the source files."

Ah, yes, I should have read the README. ;-)

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