Thomas Kurtz, RIP
Tom is well known as the co-inventor, with John Kemeny, of the BASIC programming language in 1964. A version of BASIC still exists today. John Kemeny and Tom had already developed a version of the Dartmouth Timesharing System, a method of sharing computer access allowing multiple students access to the computer at the same time. From 1966 to 1975, Tom served as the director of the Kiewit Computation Center at Dartmouth and as director of Academic Computing from 1975 to 1978. In 1979, he and former student Stephen J. Garland organized a professional master’s program in Computer and Information Sciences, CIS.
After a few years of teaching, he and Kemeny developed the original version of the Dartmouth Timesharing System (DTSS), a method of sharing computer access across a network and a requirement for allowing multiple students access to BASIC. DTSS was the earliest successful, large-scale timesharing system, a remarkable achievement. General Electric, which had donated computers to Dartmouth, extended DTSS into the kernel of their online services, such as Genie. DTSS was unveiled on May 1, 1964, along with BASIC. By that fall, hundreds of students were exploring BASIC on the 20 terminals around campus.
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In 1983, Kurtz joined Kemeny and three former Dartmouth students in forming True BASIC, Inc., whose purpose was to develop quality educational software and a platform-independent BASIC compiler.
The road to BASIC itself was a long one. Kemeny and Kurtz had forged DARSIMCO – Dartmouth Simplified Code – Dartmouth’s inaugural attempt at making a computing language in 1956; however DARSIMCO soon became obsolete when the language FORTRAN manifested itself. In 1962 Kemeny and a Dartmouth undergraduate, Sidney Marshall, created the language DOPE, Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment, which was a direct predecessor of BASIC. DOPE itself was little used, and Kurtz preferred trying to implement successful languages such as FORTRAN and ALGOL. Kurtz’s experience with Dartmouth ALGOL 30 for the LGP-30 convinced him that devising subsets of these languages was not quite practical, and this led him to adopt Kemeny’s notion of creating a new language entirely.
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