RIP
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. ®
When I started programming, BASIC hadn’t yet been released, so I couldn’t write the traditional “Hello World” program.
Instead, the first full program I wrote was in assembly language for the IBM 704, a vacuum tube monster that put out as much heat as a small pizza oven. (And I wouldn’t be surprised if a modern pizza oven has more computing power than the 704.)
The program I wrote was one which used Chebyshev Polynomials (which I had recently learned about) to compute cosines. Harder to get working than “Hello World”, but much more like serious programming, since all I had to start with was the recurrence equations. I had to use an actual book, of course, since https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev_polynomials was far in the future.
P.S. Since the 704 was at the Argonne National Laboratory, and I was at the University of Chicago, each use involved a driving with a box of punch-cards. At least it much shorter than Kurtz’s trip.
I took a computer programming course (Math 105H) at U of Chicago in fall of ‘82 from Stuart Kurtz (he was younger). He is still there. The funny thing was that he taught PASCAL and had nothing good to say about BASIC. Worse, it was standard PASCAL, no built-in string handling.
I wonder if they are related?
I'm spoiled today with a laptop running a quad core i7, 64 GB RAM, 2 TB NVme disk and 34 inch display. Languages and tools are very good today. A gigabit fiber network completes the setup. That said, we owe thanks to Kurtz and Kemeny for enabling the discipline of software engineering to get underway.
An excellent project for a quarter. By the time I was interested in doing that, I had already read through the "Dragon book" and produced code using lex and yacc in UNIX to improve accuracy of inputs to systems used at PacBell. The code delivered by Bellcore was fussy and prone to errant behavior with sloppy input.
I first coded in BASIC, and it was in 1981.
I thought it was great.
Thank you, sir!
I preferred PASCAL.
But learned about 20 or so languages.
I made my living as a systems engineer
so software design, hardware design, and repairs
of systems were my expertise.
I also build large sailboats from scratch.
I apprenticed as a shipwright when I was a kid.
I retired at age 55 in rural Hawaii.
Time for a DO Loop.
I ran a little programming languages group in that ‘74-76 timeframe in Cambridge MA and brought in Captain Grace Hopper to talk about the archeology of computers. My hero. She discussed the importance of remembering how things were done in the “old days” with small memory so that the techniques would not be lost as new applications came out needing those very same techniques. I can still remember her saluting at the end of her talk in her navy uniform. I was awestruck to have her there and get to drive her back to the airport.
I still try to keep alive the memories of those old days. I switched from language design at IBM Research to interactive video development and made videos of projects and people that I keep up on my YouTube channel as computer history.
My favorite is probably a musical memory of what it was like to be in an all day computer meeting as the day progressed. I was Secretary of the X3J13 Common Lisp group and this was a meeting in San Jose. These are all the big names in the field of Lisp.
X3J13 Lisp - Joseph Blanchard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjoZXYoDZoY
For those who know of John Backus - Backus-Naur Form and FORTRAN - this was when I was crawling around on the floor of his office during a group meeting to get B-roll for a video I was doing of the San Jose IBM Research group.
John Backus Group Meeting - IBM Research - 5 July 1989
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzBkb-bvNK4
This was a series of interviews with the IBM biggest names telling their memories of an eccentric genius, John Cocke. They were worried about his health and wanted him to know, before it was too late, how very much he was loved. Anyone who followed John around the halls to write down his ideas became famous. My husband was asked to take on that task and refused as he had his own research interests. Sigh.
Computer History - John Cocke: A Retrospective by Friends - 1990
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYwd30iWVvw
Before the video was first shown, there was a party for John and I did B-roll for that, too. One clip shows Isaac Asimov who gave the main talk.
My Old Friend - Tim McGraw - John Cocke and Computer Pioneers - 1990
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80x4wR2UDk0
LET
That was probably Fortran (Formula Translator). Doing programs on punch cards led to the notion of subroutines — a slightly worn set of cards in a rubber band with the top one labeled in felt tip, “Pi” or “Square root”, was part of pro programmers’ tool kits. :^)
.
It was a model 1 then. Model 3 was released in 1980.
Might have been a model 2, but they were pretty rare.
I later learned PASCAL, and really enjoyed it.
GOTO....
My father had trouble using the BASIC test formatting program on his new TRS-80 Model 100 laptop. I read the program — the first program I had ever seen — and thought I might be able to fix the problem. I succeeded. Talk about a gateway drug!
RIP
I started off with Fortran and Basic, then my engineering school decided to dive off into PL-1. That didn’t work out so well...
You’re right. Fortran. I was listed as a ‘research assistant’ on a project that used punch cards... so long ago. Thanks.
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