BASIC was developed at Dartmouth College and is an an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. As its name implies it is a language designed more for educational purposes than for serious programming. Developed under the direction of John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, It was meant to be a very simple language to learn and also one that would be easy to read and understand what the code was attempting to do. At first it was very crude and restrictive, for example all variables were only 2 digits in length and limited to an alphabetical character and a numerical digit. Thus the complete range of variables was A1 to Z9, and despite the general readability of the rest of the code it was still not very friendly reading.
As it was designed to be a learning step to the major languages of the time, ALGOL and FORTRAN, it also used some of the features of both such as an algorithmic procedures and linear program flow. It also used some of the more notorious features such as the dreaded GOTO statement, a command which easily lead to broken code and hopeless spaghetti logic.
Kemeny and Kurtz started first began working on a simplified computer language in 1956. Their first attempt which they designated Dartmouth Simplified Code or Darsimco, was abandoned in 1957 when FORTRAN was introduced. Another ancestor of BASIC was Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment (DOPE), which was too primitive to be useful, however both Darsimco and DOPE enabled Kemeny and Kurtz to experiment with computer languages that were targeted to the non-expert computer user which lead to the creation of BASIC.
Despite its dubious beginnings, but perhaps an indication of things to come, BASIC was the language Paul Allen and Bill Gates decided to create for a new and exciting device that was just being introduced in the early seventies. Up until that time computers were large expensive devices owned by large corporations and universities. But by that time the number of people who were exposed to computers in college and had the burning desire to continue working with them as a hobby. Kit computers were available at the time but it wasn't until Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems or MITS created the Altair computer for about $400 was it possible for hobbyists to possess one of their own.
This first "Personal Computer" was nothing like what we are used to today. There were none of the devices like hard drives or floppy drives for data storage, nor in fact did it even have a keyboard or monitor. Data had to be entered one bit at a time by manipulating the toggle switches on the front panel and output interpreted by the series of LEDs above the switches. The units were initially shipped as just the one card with an Intel 8080 microprocessor on it and the box and motherboard were added later. One of the cards available contained the BASIC written by Allen and Gates, though it did little more than announce its presence.
Unfortunately for us Gates was enamored with the language and eventually used it as the basis for a new operating system which took advantage of the disk drive technology of the time and thus DOS or Disk Operating System was born. It had the advantage of being easily ported to many types of hardware and being fairly easy to use, but suffered from lack of real processing power. Both BASIC and DOS survived and are still in use today with the additions of graphical interfaces and improvements in the language to bring it up to date with modern computing power.
