It depends on what you mean by "BASIC". Nobody in that world cared much about portability or standardization, so the language had a protean quality; every vendo

It depends on what you mean by "BASIC". Nobody in that world cared much about portability or standardization, so the language had a protean quality; every vendor offered their own flavor, tailored to the needs of its platform. The variant you used may well have been a mere teaching tool, but there certainly were other dialects which served as serious application development platforms. I was a big fan of BASIC when I was young, and that led to spending the early portion of my career working on a series of BASIC compilers, all of them intended for complex software development. Two of them still sort of exist, in much-mutated form; one is now called "Xojo", and the other is Microsoft's rather-better-known Visual Basic.