In the 1950s, most programming was done in machine language and assembly language. However, these are very difficult and tedious to program in. The first high level language was FORTRAN, which was introduced in about 1958. Shortly after its introduction, many other languages appeared. In 1963 Kemeny and Kurtz, both of Darmouth, developed BASIC, which is an acronym for Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It was developed as simplified FORTRAN.
BASIC was originally run on large machines in time-sharing mode. It was an interpreted language, with the editor and interpreter integrated to ease debugging.