In his long and illustrious career as a mathematician and computer scientist, Thomas Eugene Kurtz achieved many things. But most important was how he helped generations of other people achieve things: he co-invented BASIC, the programming language most easily-grasped by everyday users. Kurtz is dead at 96.
From 1966 to 1975, Kurtz served as the director of the Kiewit Computation Center at Dartmouth and as director of the Office of Academic Computing from 1975 to 1978. In 1979, he and Stephen J. Garland organized a professional master's program in Computer and Information Systems, funded in part with a grant from IBM.
In 1983, Kurtz joined Kemeny and three former Dartmouth students in forming True BASIC, Inc., whose purpose was to develop quality educational software and a platform-independent BASIC compiler. Upon termination of the CIS program in 1988, Kurtz returned to teaching and retired from Dartmouth in 1993.
10 PRINT "GOODBYE WORLD." You know the rest.
Previously:
• Code BBC Basic online (or just enjoy the wild tweet-size demos)
• Programming language BASIC is 60 years old
