It was developed by original Macintosh team member Donn Denman,[1][2] with help from fellow Apple programmers Marianne Hsiung, Larry Kenyon, and Bryan Stearns,[3] as part of the original Macintosh development effort starting in late 1981.

"[6] MacBASIC was released as beta software in 1985, and was adopted for use in places such as the Dartmouth College computer science department, for use in an introductory programming course.

[citation needed] Benchmarks published in Washington Apple Pi Journal suggested that MacBASIC had better performance as compared to Microsoft's MS BASIC for Macintosh.

[10] The language included modern looping control structures, user-defined functions, graphics, and access to the Macintosh Toolbox.

The development environment supported multiple programs running simultaneously with symbolic debugging including breakpoints and single-step execution.