FreeBASIC is a modern, and powerful dialect of the Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, or BASIC, family of programming languages.

The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1964. They wanted to enable students in non-scientific fields to use computers. At the time, nearly all computers required writing custom software, which only scientists and mathematicians tended to learn. Since then, BASIC has been available for a variety of computers ranging from mainframes to calculators, and to personal computers alike. FreeBASIC is a dialect of Microsoft QuickBasic, of which Microsoft qBASIC is a dialect. However, FreeBASIC offers additional features and is actively maintained.