Posted on 11/20/2024 10:03:19 AM PST by ShadowAce
Obit Professor Thomas Eugene Kurtz, co-inventor of the BASIC programming language, has died aged 96.
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.
Kemeny and Kurtz worked together to make computing more accessible to the masses, Kurtz told the Concord Monitor:
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.
The first BASIC program ran 60 years ago, but the language did not spring fully formed from their brows. At the start of their efforts, Kurtz commuted to Boston with boxes of punched cards to run on MIT's IBM 704. In 1959, Dartmouth got its first computer – a Royal McBee LGP-30, whose brochure you can admire here [PDF]. (This is the hardware immortalized in The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer.)
Initially, their LGP-30 ran ALGOL. In a 2014 interview [PDF], Kurtz recalled:
We looked at languages and we both decided that the languages FORTRAN, ALGOL – that type of language – were just too complicated. They were full of punctuation rules, the need for which was not completely obvious and therefore people weren't going to remember.
This led to one of the first precursors of BASIC, called DOPE – the Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment.
Later, Dartmouth got a General Electric GE-600 series machine, whose brochure you can peruse at Bitsavers [PDF]. Thanks to an $800,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, they got their hands on a GE-225, on which they built DTSS in 1963.
DTSS was not the first timesharing system, but it was one of the earliest – and maybe the one used by the most non-specialists. The idea of building a timesharing system was suggested to Kurtz at MIT by John McCarthy, the inventor of Lisp. This led to the development of CTSS, the Compatible Timesharing System, which inspired Multics and UNIX – and, more directly, ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing System, on which the first version of Emacs and many other tools were built.
In 1964, they got BASIC running on their new OS. The original version was a compiler, with just 15 statements. It became so popular that it set the direction of computer development for the next several decades. Notably, in 1975, two students set up a small business to develop BASIC interpreters for eight-bit microcomputers. The late, great Quincy Jones said of one of them: "You know who sings and plays just like Hendrix? Paul Allen … He's good, man."
Rather than "control the development and use of BASIC," Kemeny and Kurtz chose "to put the language into the public domain so that it would be widely used." In 1983, disenchanted by the multiple incompatible versions they termed "street BASIC," they turned Dartmouth BASIC 7 into a commercial product: TrueBASIC.
Professor Kurtz was awarded the 1991 Computer Pioneer Award, and in 1994 was made a Fellow of the ACM.
Kurtz retired in 1993. He was married twice, and is survived by Agnes Seelye Bixler, whom he met while hiking – one of his favorite activities – and by three children: twin sons Daniel Barr Kurtz and Timothy David Kurtz, daughter Beth Louise Kurtz, plus nine grandchildren and 17 great-grandchildren. ®
1 PRINT “GOODBYE WORLD.”
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
Hahahaha !!!! (Nice one)
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.
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.
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.
Bill Gates should goto his funeral.
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.
Bookmark
END. Wow, that hit home.
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.
John Kemeny was Einstein's personal assistant during his years at the Institute for Advanced Study.
:^) I screwed up, should have included “: END”. :^D
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.
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.
Was that the computer punch cards we use to use? A small program would have a thousand cards? Is that this guy?
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.
^z
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.
10 print “RIP”
20 goto 10
Run
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.