The original Dartmouth BASIC was designed in 1964 by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA to provide computer access to non-science students. At the time, nearly all use of computers required writing custom software, which was something only scientists and mathematicians tended to do. The language and its variants became widespread on microcomputers in the late 1970s and 1980s, when it was typically a standard feature, and often actually built into the firmware of the machine.
BASIC remains popular to this day in a handful of highly modified dialects and new languages influenced by BASIC such as Microsoft Visual Basic. In 2006, 59% of developers for the .NET Framework used Visual Basic .NET as their only programming language.
SOURCE: wikipedia