At Dartmouth, long before the days of laptops and smartphones, he worked to give more students access to computers. That work helped propel generation

Thomas E. Kurtz, a Creator of BASIC Computer Language, Dies at 96

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2024-11-16 23:00:03

At Dartmouth, long before the days of laptops and smartphones, he worked to give more students access to computers. That work helped propel generations into a new world.

Thomas E. Kurtz, a pioneering mathematician at Dartmouth and an inventor of the simplified computer programming language known as BASIC, which allowed students to easily operate early computers and eventually propelled generations into the world of personal computing, died on Tuesday in Lebanon, N.H. He was 96.

In the early 1960s, before the days of laptops and smartphones, a computer was the size of a small car and an institution like Dartmouth, where Dr. Kurtz taught, had just one. Programming one was the province of scientists and mathematicians, specialists who understood the nonintuitive commands used to manipulate data through the hulking machines, which processed data in large batches, an effort that sometimes took days or weeks to complete.

Dr. Kurtz and John G. Kemeny, then the chairman of Dartmouth’s math department, believed that students would increasingly come to depend on computers and would benefit from understanding how to use them.

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