On this day in 1964, the first BASIC program was run. From the Wired article:"Mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz had been trying to make computing more accessible to their undergraduate students. One problem was that available computing languages like Fortran and Algol were so complex that you really had to be a professional to use them. BASIC is still alive and well these days, from Microsoft's VB.net to cross-platform variants like REALbasic. For the old-school among us, there's always Joshua Bell's Apple II BASIC emulator implemented in Javascript.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/dayintech_0501
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_.NET
http://realbasic.com/
http://www.calormen.com/Applesoft/