Thomas E. Kurtz, Co-Inventor of BASIC, Dies At 96

Slashdot readers damn_registrars and GFS666 share the news of the passing of Thomas E. Kurtz, co-inventor of the BASIC programming language back in the 1960s. He was 96. Hackaday reports: The origins of BASIC lie in the Dartmouth Timesharing System, like similar timesharing operating systems of the day, designed to allow the resources of a single computer to be shared across many terminals. In this case the computer was at Dartmouth College, and BASIC was designed to be a language with which software could be written by average students who perhaps didn't have a computing background. In the decade that followed it proved ideal for the new microcomputers, and few were the home computers of the era which didn't boot into some form of BASIC interpreter. Kurtz continued his work as a distinguished academic and educator until his retirement in 1993, but throughout he remained as the guiding hand of the language.

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