> I explicitly mentioned that 8 bit home computers were the ones to blame for the fame of BASIC being interpreted, and unstructured.
Interpreted yes, unstructured no. Dartmouth BASIC was unstructured until 7th edition (1980). The home BASICs started coming out before then and could fairly claim their unstructured nature as a consequence of the contemporary, to them, Dartmouth BASIC.
If you look at the BASIC that's 60 now, you won't see a lot of the features that appeared later in SBASIC (in the late 70's) and on dialects from Dec, IBM, Nixdorf, and others. In 1964, it was a very simple language with the impressive feature - and this is the most important ergonomic aspect - of allowing interactive exploration.
Original Dartmouth BASIC is a thing of beauty. Simple enough to learn in an afternoon, but powerful enough to do useful (and fun) things, from numerical computation to games.
And it wasn't just the BASIC language (and its compiler) that made it so effective, but the entire system: a remotely accessible, timeshared/multiuser, interactive environment.
The idea that every student (including humanities and social science majors) could learn how to program (and be given computer time) seems extraordinary and inspiring. The idea that computing could be useful and important outside of science/math/engineering departments was also visionary (probably going back to LISP - note John McCarthy organized the first AI workshop in 1956 at Dartmouth.)
Dialects like VMS Basic predate them.