Thomas Kurtz: co-creator of the BASIC language dies at 96 – Revista Clube MSX
Thomas E. Kurtz , co-creator of the BASIC programming language, died last Tuesday (12), at the age of 96. A professor at Dartmouth College , a private American university, Kurtz not only contributed to the development of BASIC but also helped transform it into an industry standard during the golden age of home computers.
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According to information from Bloomberg, Thomas Kurtz died at a hospice center in Lebanon, New Hampshire. The information was confirmed by his wife, Agnes .
The BASIC language
BASIC, an acronym for Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code , was invented by John Kemeny , chairman of the Dartmouth mathematics department, and Kurtz, one of his colleagues, as part of an effort to make computing more accessible. Kemeny, who would later become president of Dartmouth, died in 1992.
The pair initially introduced the Dartmouth Time Sharing System ( DTSS ), which allowed short-term access to the college's computer—a General Electric model purchased in 1964—to a broad community of interested users.
DTSS was one of the first time-sharing systems for computers. The concept of time-sharing was revolutionary at the time because it allowed multiple users to access and use a single mainframe computer at the same time, through remote terminals connected to the main computer.
Although the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had been using a time-sharing system since 1961, Dartmouth said its version was the first aimed primarily at non-technical users. Students from 50 schools and colleges were able to access and use the system through remote terminals connected by telephone to the school's central computers.
For Thomas Kurtz, Fortran and Algol were complicated
The two professors then set about creating “a high-level language” for “non-specialist users of the system,” wrote Robert Slater in his 1987 book Portraits in Silicon. At the time, IBM’s Fortran was the dominant computer programming language.
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“We looked at the languages and decided that Fortran and Algol and those kinds of languages were just too complicated,” Thomas Kurtz said in an interview. “They were full of punctuation rules that weren’t completely obvious, and so people didn’t remember them.”
With the help of Dartmouth students, Kemeny and Kurtz integrated their new language into the timesharing system, launching both on May 1, 1964.
Via Bloomberg .
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