The two math professors deeply believed that computer literacy would be essential in the years to come, and designed the language–its name stood for “Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code”–to be as approachable as possible. It worked: at first at Dartmouth, then at other schools.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, when home computers came along, BASIC did as much as anything else to make them useful. Especially the multiple versions of the language produced by a small company named Microsoft. That’s when I was introduced to the language; when I was in high school, I was more proficient in it than I was in written English, because it mattered more to me. (I happen to have been born less than a month before BASIC was, which may or may not have anything to do with my affinity for it.)

BASIC wasn’t designed to change the world. “We were thinking only of Dartmouth,” says Kurtz, its surviving co-creator. (Kemeny died in 1992.) “We needed a language that could be ‘taught’ to virtually all students (and faculty) without their having to take a course.”

Their brainchild quickly became the standard way that people everywhere learned to program computers, and remained so for many years. But thinking of its invention as a major moment only in the history of computer languages dramatically understates its significance.

In the mid-1960s, using a computer was generally like playing chess by mail: You used a keypunch to enter a program on cards, turned them over to a trained operator and then waited for a printout of the results, which might not arrive until the next day. BASIC and the platform it ran on, the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, both sped up the process and demystified it. You told the computer to do something by typing words and math statements, and it did it, right away.

“We were thinking only of Dartmouth.”Today, we expect computers–and phones, and tablets and an array of other intelligent devices–to respond to our instructions and requests as fast as we can make them. In many ways, that era of instant gratification began with what Kemeny and Kurtz created. Moreover, their work reached the public long before the equally vital breakthroughs of such 1960s pioneers as Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse and other concepts still with us in modern user interfaces.

You might assume that a programming language whose primary purpose was to help almost anybody become computer-literate would be uncontroversial—maybe even universally beloved. You’d be wrong. BASIC always had its critics among serious computer science types, who accused it of promoting bad habits. Even its creators became disgruntled with the variations on their original idea that proliferated in the 1970s and 1980s.

And eventually, BASIC went away, at least as a staple of computing in homes and schools. Nobody conspired to get rid of it; no one factor explains its gradual disappearance from the scene. But some of us miss it terribly.

When it comes to technology, I don’t feel like a grumpy old man. Nearly always, I believe that the best of times is now. But I don’t mind saying this: The world was a better place when almost everybody who used PCs at least dabbled in BASIC.