Thomas E. Kurtz (1928-2024) gave us Basic lessons in computer software
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Thomas Eugene Kurtz, a pioneer in computer science whose vision of accessible computing transformed education and technology, passed away on 12 November at the age of 96. Kurtz’s enduring contributions reshaped how the world interacts with computers, empowering generations of programmers and hobbyists (shorturl.at/2tnHc).
As a co-creator of the Basic programming language and a driving force behind the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS), Kurtz believed that computing should be a tool for everyone, not just a specialized elite. This ethos underpinned his work at Dartmouth College, where he dedicated his career to democratizing computer access. I was a beneficiary.
While my contemporaries who attended an IIT for a Computer Science degree learnt esoteric programming languages such as Fortran and Pascal, I got my introduction to the world of technology through Kurtz’s Basic. Kurtz joined Dartmouth’s mathematics department in 1956 after earning his PhD from Princeton University. In the early 1960s, computing was a privilege of the few, requiring intricate knowledge of hardware and programming languages like Fortran and assembly language.
Computers were massive room-filling machines and users had to schedule time to run their programs sequentially—a tedious and slow process. Recognizing these limitations, Kurtz and his colleague John G. Kemeny sought to change the paradigm.
In 1964, they developed the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS), which let multiple users access a central computer simultaneously. DTSS maximized efficiency and opened up computing to more people by enabling real-time concurrent use. It was a pioneering step toward the interactive and networked systems we take for
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