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...