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BASIC Co-Inventor Thomas E. Kurtz has Passed Away.

It’s with sadness that we note the passing of Thomas Eugene Kurtz, on November 12th. He was co-inventor of the BASIC programming language back in the 1960s. The legacy of his work lives on in the generation of technologists.

>10 PRINT "Rest in Peace"
>20 GOTO 10

https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-memoriam-thomas-e-kurtz-1928-2024/

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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.
[ImageSource: Computerhistory.org]

“Thomas Eugene Kurtz (Feb. 22 1928–Nov. 12, 2024) was an American mathematician, computer scientist and co-inventor, with John Kemeny, of the BASIC programming language and Dartmouth Timesharing System.”