Even Microsoft got rid of them sometime in the late '80s :-)
I actually kinda missed them for awhile... it makes it a lot harder to have an interactive/interpreted environment (like the old BASICs were) when it's no longer trivial to use "list 100-200" or whatever and then enter "150 print "hello!" " ...
I remember learning the hard way back on an Apple II about how only the first two characters of a variable name were significant. "print teevee$" gives the same result as "print teletubbies$"-- it killed some of my first attempts to use meaningful vairable names rather than just a$, b$, etc... @#$@#% (this restriction was lifted in later/fancier BASICs, of course)