Tiny BASIC is a family of dialects of the BASIC programming language that can fit into 4 or fewer KBs of memory. Tiny BASIC was designed by Dennis Allison and the People's Computer Company (PCC) in response to the open letter published by Bill Gates complaining about users pirating Altair BASIC, which sold for $150. Tiny BASIC was intended to be a completely free version of BASIC that would run on the same early microcomputers.
A paper tape containing the expanded 8K version of Microsoft BASIC
The May 1977 issue featured a Floppy ROM containing MICRO-BASIC.
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.
