Minimal BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language developed as an international standard. The effort started at ANSI in January 1974, and was joined in September by a parallel group at ECMA. The first draft was released for comments in January 1976 and the final standard, known alternately as ANSI X3.60-1978 or ECMA-55, was published in December 1977. The US Bureau of Standards introduced the NBSIR 77-1420 test suite to ensure implementations met the definition.
By this time, Microsoft BASIC was beginning to take over the market after its introduction on early microcomputers in 1975, and especially after the introduction of the 1977 "trinity" - the Apple II, Commodore PET and TRS-80, all of which would cement MS-style BASICs as the de facto standard. ISO standardization of Minimal BASIC began as ISO 6373:1984 but was abandoned in 1998. An effort to produce a more powerful dialect, Full BASIC (also known as Standard BASIC), was not released until January 1987 and had little impact on the market.