1960 to 1969: The Rise of Business Computers and Business Software - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 121

Note
I worked with Dr. Charles Turk to create IBM's first software es-
timation tool in 1973. This tool was called the Interactive Pro-
ductivity and Quality model (IPQ), and it was coded in APL by Dr.
Turk.
The PL/I language was also developed by IBM. (The abbreviation used a Ro-
man numeral “I” instead of an Arabic “1” for marketing reasons.) The S/360 com-
puter was envisioned as being suitable for both business and scientific purposes.
Up until this time, programming languages had either been oriented toward math
and science, such as FORTRAN (which stood for formula translator), or for busi-
ness, such as COBOL (which stood for common business-oriented language).
With the S/360 being marketed as a general-purpose machine for both business
and scientific uses, IBM wanted a companion programming language that could
also be used for both business and scientific applications. The first definition of
PL/I appeared in 1964.
The PL/I language was powerful and effective but did not become the standard
language for everything as IBM had hoped. The PL/I language was still in use in
2012.
The history of the family of BASIC programming languages is well known.
The first dialect of BASIC was developed by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz of
Dartmouth College in 1964. The BASIC language was aimed at computer users
who were not mathematicians and who needed a fairly simple language to com-
plete their tasks. BASIC aimed, and succeeded, in being easy to learn and easy to
use.
In later decades, when the use of personal computers exploded, BASIC dialects
were the tool of choice for millions of hobbyists and casual programmers. Still
today, there are more than a dozen dialects of BASIC, including some like Visual
Basic from Microsoft that are used to create commercial and industrial software as
well as for personal applications.