"Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal"
http://time.com/69316/basic/
Maybe interesting, certainly nostalgic read, though maybe a bit colored by the author's perspective, but then he's too young to have ever worked with main frame computers. And like many of the people he quotes, McCracken seems to suffer from a Very narrow world view, not understanding that the majority of people have little interest in, & often not so much aptitude for coding.
Mainframes were tremendously expensive investments, & system analysts were hugely overpaid [& I'm talking lower end CEO territory] because there weren't enough of them. At one time companies like IBM went around looking for anyone with lots of college math, e.g. engineers, offering to train them at their expense to become system analysts & such. Programmers took a 2 year college program, then more-or-less worked as apprentices -- it took maybe 5-6 years before they were allowed to do much more than program the minimal formatting for reports. All input was done using keypunch cards -- companies had keypunch departments, with rooms full of keypunch machines -- being a keypunch operator was actually a lower end career you went to school for. Being a computer operator was a notch above that, sort of equivalent to today's sys admins. This was the world BASIC was born into.
The Time article says BASIC was developed to allow more immediate access to computing, IMHO the biggest leap forward it made was allowing the use of teletype machines, taking away the need for keypunch machines, readers etc. It allowed among other things expanding the number of programming classes that a school could offer. While the author treats BASIC as rather crude -- an attitude shared by many [most?] of the computer folk he quotes -- what set BASIC apart IMHO is the extra layer of software to interpret BASIC commands. And that core concept is very much a part of computing today. It's Windows vs. DOS or at least early Unix [the inspiration for Linux]. Yes, early BASIC's commands weren't as powerful as Fortran, but that came along with time. As far as allowing easier access goes, you didn't have to learn keypunch, or go through a keypunch dept., or have your stuff scheduled with all the other jobs a computer operator had to run.
When win3.1 & NT were in use there were several companies selling easier to use programming software based on the idea of BASIC. Later on Microsoft came out with Visual Basic -- to say it was hugely popular would be an understatement, particularly with database admins where it's still often in use. Microsoft's VB for Applications is still in use for programming macros etc. in all sorts of apps -- Kingsoft Office uses it. Problem is MS quit developing VB proper, & never did get around versioning problems with the shared VB support files needed to run a VB app. If you ran software using the latest VB stuff, adding an app that used earlier versions could replace those support files & break the newer VB software. There's really been no need for anyone else to try and expand or develop BASIC IMHO -- there are several alternative programming environments or languages that take it's place, starting with Perl [perl.org] as *maybe* the oldest.
As to the original dev's hopes for BASIC... As I started, only some people have brains that work that way, can be intuitively good or even great coders. For most people it's work, & in the developed world, usually low paying work at that. What Microsoft hopes will get more people coding is the huge financial incentives if you hit it lucky with an app in the Windows Store -- what makes the Windows Store different is the relative lack of competition [do you know how many Android & iOS apps there are already?].