A programming language. Early versions were very primitive (line numbers and GOTO statements encourage spaghetti code) and very not powerful, with little possibility of low-level control over the machine. Implementations of the Basic language (such as Applesoft Basic) added more power but had a portability around zero. Basic probably reached a high point around the time of QBasic (with while statements and true functions with local variables and no more steenkin' line numbers) and started to go downhill once Microsoft released Visual Basic, creating a legion of script kiddies who think Visual Basic is a real programming language.