Thomas E. Kurtz, creator of BASIC computer language, dies at 96
Dartmouth College and an inventor of the simplified computer programming language known as BASIC, which allowed students to easily operate early computers and eventually propelled generations into the world of personal computing, died Tuesday in Lebanon, New Hampshire. He was 96.
The cause of his death, in a hospice, was multiple organ failure from sepsis, said Agnes Kurtz, his wife.
In the early 1960s, before the days of laptops and smartphones, a computer was the size of a small car and an institution like Dartmouth, where Kurtz taught, had just one. Programming one was the province of scientists and mathematicians, specialists who understood the nonintuitive commands used to manipulate data through the hulking machines, which processed data in large batches, an effort that sometimes took days or weeks to complete.
Kurtz and John G. Kemeny, then the chair of Dartmouth's math department, believed that students would increasingly come to depend on computers and would benefit from understanding how to use them.
«We had the crazy idea that our students, our undergraduate students who are not going to be technically employed later on, social sciences and humanities students, should learn how to use the computer,» Kurtz said in an interview for Dartmouth in 2014. «Completely nutty idea.»
Marketing
Future of Marketing & Branding Masterclass
By — Dr. David Aaker, Professor Emeritus at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, Author | Speaker | Thought Leader | Branding Consultant
Data Science
SQL for Data Science
