BASIC co-creator Thomas Kurtz hits END at 96

The Register ^ | 20 November 2024 | Liam Proven

[ShadowAce]

[11th_VA]

It’s time for him to GOTO

[ProtectOurFreedom]

The masses always enjoyed spaghetti.

[Tell It Right]

I owe my career to being able to casually write code at home in BASIC on a cheap computer (C64) before I was old enough to drive.

[11th_VA]

IF HEARTBEAT < 0 GOTO …

[shotgun]

I used BASIC to leave nasty messages to our IT Nazis when they would snoop our PCs after hours.

[left that other site]

Let’s hope he will GOTO heaven.

[shotgun]

That was in 1991-1996

[left that other site]

Ooops...you beat me to it.

[George from New England]

In subsequent languages GOTO was a no no. You cannot do that. Everything became GOSUB. Gotta return to where you came from I guess.
It did improve logic flow in many ways.

[TangoLimaSierra]

If heart beating Then live Else dead

[11th_VA]

I owe my career to being able to casually write code

Ditto - I probably could have gotten by with just 3 college courses

[dfwgator]

I remember learning BASIC on the TRS-80 back around 1979, been programming ever since.

[left that other site]

From GOTO Thou hast Come, UNTO GOTO Thou Shalt GOTO. :-)

[sasquatch]

<1

I use hp Basic on a 71B every day.

[No name given]

Rest In Peace, Eugene.

[Tell It Right]

Ditto - I probably could have gotten by with just 3 college courses

I could too. But I'm happy I took a lot of my CS courses. For my BS my college required we write our own pre-compiler. To get a specialization in network programming we had to take computational modeling (numerical modeling, not 3-D modeling). Those courses required me to stretch my design and analytical abilities so that later anything I did for work was easy by comparison.

[DeplorablePaul]

Me too. I learned to program Basic by typing in the long programs from pc magazine. One time I wrote a program to see which numbers of a lotto drawing come up the most frequently and let it run for a month. It proved nothing but it was fun to write. During my 30 career as a Unix Admin I was particularly good at writing shell scripts to automate procedures - I hardly ever had to do the same thing twice - and monitoring functions. It was because of the hours I spent at my TRS 80 Basic programming.

[USAF1985]

Back in the 80’s I accidently left my programming textbook at home. My dad had bought me an old TI-99 computer to play around on while I was taking the class in high school. He started flipping through the textbook, and by the time I got home, he was a billion times better at it than I ever was (basic programming). We both had good times trying to outdo each other. Lost dad in 91, and it’s memories like that that keep me going. Cheers to Thomas Kurtz, and thanks for the memory (all 256 bytes of it). :)