When I learned to program in the late 70s it was on a Wang 2200 computer. But I quickly was exposed to a number of Microsoft BASIC flavors: first hand on Apple

When I learned to program in the late 70s it was on a Wang 2200 computer. But I quickly was exposed to a number of Microsoft BASIC flavors: first hand on Apple 2 and TRS-80s, plus reading lots of code in BYTE Magazine and Personal Computing. Wang BASIC was very different from those -- in some ways very limited, and in other ways very powerful. But it wasn't until I read the original Dartmouth BASIC report that I realize Wang had hewed more closely to Dartmouth BASIC than Microsoft. http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dartmouth/BASIC_Oct64.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dartmouth/BASIC_Oct64.pdf For example, Dartmouth and Wang BASIC both have support for matrix operations: 10 DIM A(5,5),B(5,5),C(5,5) 20 MAT READ A 30 MAT B=INV(A) 40 MAT C=A*B 50 MAT PRINT C 60 DATA (25 numbers to fill up the array) which would print a 5x5 array that was very close to the identity matrix.