Along with his colleague, John Kemeny, Kurtz's work revolutionized computing, operating systems, and programming language design. Kurtz was born in Il

BASIC co-creator Thomas Kurtz hits END at 96

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2024-11-25 14:30:06

Along with his colleague, John Kemeny, Kurtz's work revolutionized computing, operating systems, and programming language design.

Kurtz was born in Illinois in 1928, and died last week in a hospice in New Hampshire, the home of Dartmouth College where he worked and taught.

Kurtz is most famous as the co-inventor of the BASIC programming language, but almost as influential was the operating system on which BASIC first ran, which he also co-designed: the Dartmouth Timesharing System or DTSS.

Kurtz co-designed both DTSS and the BASIC language alongside his Dartmouth colleague, Professor John George Kemeny, who died in 1992 aged 66. Although just two years older, Kemeny was head of mathematics at Dartmouth. He hired Kurtz as a statistics instructor when the slightly younger man was fresh from Princeton, where he got his doctorate in 1956.

Of course, by "masses" we meant "Dartmouth students"; in particular those not majoring in the sciences. (The graduates who in later years became CEOs, etc., normally majored in the Social Sciences or Humanities.) It turned out that we also meant high school students.