Altair BASIC is a discontinued interpreter for the BASIC programming language that ran on the MITS Altair 8800 and subsequent S-100 bus computers. It was Microsoft's first product, distributed by MITS under a contract. Altair BASIC was the start of the Microsoft BASIC product range.
The title page of the assembly language code that produced Altair BASIC
Altair 8K BASIC on paper tape
BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1963. They wanted to enable students in non-scientific fields to use computers. At the time, nearly all computers required writing custom software, which only scientists and mathematicians tended to learn.
The HP 2000 system was designed to run time-shared BASIC as its primary task.
"Train Basic every day!"—reads a poster (bottom center) in a Russian school (c. 1985–1986)
BASIC came to some video game systems, such as the Nintendo Famicom.