It is partly thanks to Basic, the computer language that he co-created, that computers ceased to be these mysterious, even downright repulsive, machines. A major figure in the democratization of computing, Thomas E. Kurtz died Tuesday, November 12 in Lebanon, in the United States. He was 96 years old.
Born in 1928 in the state of Illinois, he obtained his first university degree there in 1950, then completed a master’s and doctorate in mathematics at the prestigious Princeton University. It was at the University of California, in 1951, that he first came into contact with a computer – a machine which, at the time, was the size of a Norman wardrobe and cost more than a house. In 1956, he was recruited into the teaching staff at the venerable University of Dartmouth (New Hampshire), located 200 kilometers from Boston, by the mathematician John Kemeny – a time assistant to Albert Einstein. Kurtz and Kemeny share the same radical idea: every student should be able to use a computer, regardless of their level in science, regardless of their discipline. An idea “ completely crazy » judged Thomas E. Kurtz in a 2014 interview at his university. A conviction that they sought to put into practice in the early 1960s.
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Kurtz and Kemeny imagine a place where students will be able to access a machine without having to reserve it, as was often the case, several days in advance. In a presentation brochure dating back to 1966, John Kemeny compares this place to libraries where “any student can come in and browse the books [sans] no permission ». In this computer center, no one will ask them “if they are working on a serious research problem or doing homework like a dilettante, playing a game of football, writing a letter to their girlfriend,” writes John Kemeny, who died in 1992.
To achieve their vision, Kurtz and Kemeny are working on a two-part project. The first consists of connecting dozens of computer stations to a single central computer, in order to share the calculation time. The second: building a new ultra-simplified computer language allowing you to write a small program after just a few hours of training. Helped by their students, the two academics imagined the Darsimco language, then Dope, which were quickly abandoned. The third attempt will be the good one: the Basic is born, for « Beginner’s all-purpose symbolic instruction code »or “Multipurpose Symbolic Instruction Code for Beginners”.
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