Mathematics and computer science researcher Thomas E. Kurtz died Tuesday, November 12 in Lebanon, New Hampshire at the age of 96, following complications from sepsis, explains the New York Times.
Thomas E. Kurtz is, with his colleague John G. Kemeny, the co-creator of the BASIC language in 1964. As its name (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) indicates, this language was invented to allow students to start programming, when the languages of the time (assembler, but also the higher level languages Fortran and COBOL, for example) were difficult to learn.
In a documentary published in 2014 by Dartmouth University and cited by the New York Times, Thomas E. Kurtz explains: “ we had the crazy idea that our students, our undergraduates, who would not work in technical sectors later – the humanities and social sciences students – should learn how to use the computer. A completely crazy idea ».
The two colleagues also invented one of the first systems integrating the pseudo-parallelism approach, the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System.
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