Shortly after, Kemeny became involved in an effort to produce an ANSI standard BASIC in an attempt to bring together the many small variations of the language that had developed through the late 1960s and early 1970s.

By the early 1980s, tens of millions of home computers were running some variation of Microsoft BASIC, which had become the de facto standard.

The ANSI efforts eventually became pointless, as it became clear that these versions were not going to have any market impact in a world dominated by Microsoft.

The designers wanted to make the language hardware-independent, so True BASIC source code would run equally well on any version of their compiler.

The drawback for users was that direct access to some features of their machines was not available, but this could be remedied with callable functions and subroutines specially written in assembly language.

He criticized the lack of output when encountering an error, preventing interactive debugging by "inserting print statements as diagnostics".