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Basic, stand for beginners all purpose symbolic Instruction Code. This is a programming language and it was developed by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz in 1960 with the help of Dartmouth College. This language was originally developed as an interactive language for mainframes and then was widely used on small computers. There are several versions of Basic such as Business Basic, including Microsoft's Visual Basic, which is very popular.
BASIC is available in both compiler and interpreter forms. As an interpreter, the language is conversational and can be debugged at any time. It can also be used as a quick calculator.

This is a very simple language originally designed for beginners and students. Basic has many dialects, and is popular on microcomputers with sound and graphics support. Most micro versions are interactive and interpreted. BASIC is a language designed only for educational purpose as a toy but it was taken too seriously by some hackers who used it to spread malware. A beginner can write short BASIC programs with 10-20 lines very easily. The negative part is that one gets used to this type of easy programs and then it is harder to use more powerful languages.

At first, all references to code, both subroutine call GOTO and GOSUB referred to the destination by its line number. This allowed for very simple editing and was considered essential. Just typing the line number deleted the line; and to edit a line, you just typed the new line with the same number. Typically the programs allow intersections when were numbered in steps of ten. Later versions, such as BASIC V, allow GOTO-less structured programming with named procedures and functions, IF-THEN-ELSE-ENDIF constructs and while loops etc.

Early Basics’ only had graphic characters. Later in the 1970s BASIC interpreters became standard features in mainframes and minicomputers. Some versions included matrix operations as language primitives.  Also, became important part of the personal computer revolution. Microsoft's BASIC interpreter for the Altair, was one of the driving forces. BASIC made the APPLE I and APPLE II machines an excellent tool for learning programming

BASIC programming language was the most used in home computers in the 1980's. These were Timex-Sinclair 1000, Commodore 64, VIC-20, Atari computers, the TI-99/4A, and IBM PCs and XTs numerous others.
In the 1990's, BASIC developed notable advances such as Visual Basic from Microsoft, which provided a fast application development environment (RAD) for the BASIC language. BASIC today is working out into a family of modern, powerful dialects.
According to some programmers BASIC cannot be always implemented as an interpreted language; and in the modern implementations of the language, line numbers are not required like in the original version. In classic 1980's personal computer versions, line numbers were necessary.