BASIC co-creator Thomas Kurtz hits END at 96

The Register ^ | 20 November 2024 | Liam Proven

[SunkenCiv]

1 PRINT “GOODBYE WORLD.”

[11th_VA]

At the end of my second year, I had Basic, Fortran, and Numerical Analysis - that was enough for be to get a part time position and work my way through school. Those were the days

[11th_VA]

Hahahaha !!!! (Nice one)

[NorthMountain]

Everything became GOSUB

With a reasonably well named subroutine, the reader doesn't have to actually direct his eyes to that code in order understand what that particular line does.

[kosciusko51]

I started with BASIC on the Trash-80 and Apple II in ‘82, and have been programming as needed since. But I haven’t used BASIC since learning Fortran, C, etc.

[ShadowAce]

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

That's about the same timeframe I was doing that also.

Had a TRS-80 Model I with 16k of RAM and a cassette drive.

[bigbob]

Bill Gates should goto his funeral.

[ShadowAce]

For my BS my college required we write our own pre-compiler.

I had a class where we were given a made-up computer language--had to write the assembler, compiler, linker-loader, and VM within a 10-week quarter. The final was him giving us a program, and running it through all of our projects to produce the desired results. Best CS class I ever took.

[aquila48]

Bookmark

[FamiliarFace]

END. Wow, that hit home.

[Tell It Right]

For me the magazine I most typed programs from was Compute (C-64 mag). At the age of 15 I made the board game Monopoly from scratch in BASIC, complete with joystick control so you wouldn't have to lean over the keyboard all the time. LOL

I even built what I called "lazy mode" so that it would automatically roll the dice and handle all transactions until it came time for decisions to have to be made (i.e. if you couldn't pay what you owed someone for landing on his hotel). My father had used that board game for years to teach me math skills, including letting me be banker like a "big boy". So he was very proud in my teens on days when we'd come home from work/school and play it on the C-64.

[Steely Tom]

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

John Kemeny was Einstein's personal assistant during his years at the Institute for Advanced Study.

[SunkenCiv]

:^) I screwed up, should have included “: END”. :^D

[CatOwner]

BASIC was my first programming language. Taught myself in high school. I took several football board games, extracted out the plays and percentages, and merged them into a single game which I programmed in BASIC. Several of us used to play most every lunch hour, tweaking the game along the way based on our user experience.

[mairdie]

First book I ever wrote was a Basic instruction manual. I was just starting my first master’s degree and was bored out of my gourd. Volunteered at their comp center and got assigned to a Basic project without knowing the language. Figured I wasn’t alone in being disgusted by the instruction manual they gave me, so I wrote one for the other people. I was later hired to write the reference manual for CS-4, a Navy standard language, in a language design company and that’s how I got into computer language design.

[GOPJ]

Was that the computer punch cards we use to use? A small program would have a thousand cards? Is that this guy?

[The Antiyuppie]

The most productive language ever designed was IMO Visual Basic. Bill Gates loved it and the academic snobs at Microsoft hated it. I did some fairly interesting things with it in the 90’s.

[Chode]

^z

[mairdie]

Everything was punched cards in those days. We’d have one day turnaround and you’d better have put sequence numbers on your cards or the comp center would just run dropped decks as is for your one and only chance. Always put a chill down my spine to see dropped decks at the curb in the puddles when the operators would bump the trolley with the decks as they went between programming buildings and the main computer building.

[BigFreakinToad]

10 print “RIP”
20 goto 10
Run