Here is a nice article about the creation and evolution of BASIC: Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal: http://time.com/69316/basic/

An excerpt from the article: "Once upon a time, knowing how to use a computer was virtually synonymous with knowing how to program one. And the thing that made it possible was a programming language called BASIC."

By the way, I have preserved an IBM Logo interpreter, a GW-BASIC interpreter, and a QuickBasic compiler from my childhood days here: https://github.com/susam/dosage/tree/master/langs. These three tools has played an important role in my life because these tools got me interested in programming.

Logo showed me how simple and elegant programming can be. The fact that it produced cool visual effects was a bonus. For example:

  REPEAT 10 [REPEAT 360 [FD 1 RT 1] RT 36]

Logo gave me a brief taste of functional programming even though back then I did not know the term "functional programming". I discovered the same simplicity and elegance later in Lisp about 15 years later. After all, Logo can be thought of as a dialect of Lisp without parentheses that controls a turtle.

GW-BASIC introduced me to procedural programming language. It was fun but I was unhappy that I could not produce .EXE files with it. Somehow .EXE files felt more real. Being naive, I would rename .BAS files to .EXE files hoping that it would somehow make it a standalone executable. Finally, I found the holy grail when I found QuickBasic compiler which could compile .BAS files to .EXEs. This experience taught me the difference between source code and machine code.