RIP: Thomas Kurtz, 96: co-inventor of the BASIC programming language

[thewayne]

Hard to imagine what programming would be like without his contribution to programming languages!

"Kurtz began teaching at Dartmouth upon receiving his PhD. After a few years, he and fellow professor John Kemeny developed the original version of the Dartmouth Timesharing System (DTSS), a method of sharing computer access across a network and a requirement for allowing multiple students access to BASIC."

At the time, there were only professional programming languages, such as assembler, possibly Fortran and RPG, available. They wanted to open the world of computers to students who weren't mathematicians or computer scientists to see what they could learn.

And boy, did they ever!

https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-memoriam-thomas-e-kurtz-1928-2024/

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/24/11/20/0528224/thomas-e-kurtz-co-inventor-of-basic-dies-at-96

Comments

[disneydream06]

Another unsung hero.
Hugs, Jon

[silveradept]

One of the first wonders of understanding that computers were programmable was through BASIC, as I copied down lines from a book of computer code, and then was encouraged to experiment with the programs to make them better, easier, harder, or different than what they were before. Without that, I might not be as confident in taking on some other programming languages and some of the challenges of the smart home brain.

[thewayne]

Pretty much the same thing here, back in the mid '70s.  It was a great intro.