Thomas Kurtz

Codesigner of the BASIC programming language

• Born: February 22, 1928
• Place of Birth: Oak Park, Illinois

Primary Company/Organization: Dartmouth College

Introduction

Thomas Kurtz taught computer science and mathematics at Dartmouth for thirty-seven years. With John G. Kemeny, Kurtz collaborated on projects including the design and development of the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS) and the Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC). In 1974, they received the American Federation of Information Processing Societies' first Pioneer's Day award, and in 1983 they founded True BASIC, Inc., to market and promote their standardized version of BASIC.

Early Life

Thomas Eugene Kurtz was born in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, to Oscar Christ Kurtz, who was employed at the headquarters of the International Lion's Club, and Helen Bell Kurtz. Kurtz attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, planning to major in physics. After taking all available mathematics courses, he switched to statistics, accepting his adviser's suggestion that the field would allow him to use his mathematical background in many different scientific areas. Kurtz graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1950.

Kurtz went to graduate school at Princeton University. Forman Acton of the electrical engineering department triggered his interest in computing. Acton got Kurtz a summer position at the Institute of Numerical Analysis, National Bureau of Standards, on the University of California, Los Angeles, campus. Kurtz spent the summer attending lectures on computing and getting acquainted with many of the early computer pioneers.

Kurtz spent 1952 through 1956 as research assistant in the Analytical Research Group at Princeton, writing programs to solve classified problems, including those dealing with effectiveness of air-to-air rocket salvoes. He used an International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) card-programmed calculator. Sometimes he transferred cards from the output bin to the input hopper on the night shift. In 1956, he received his PhD in mathematical statistics from Princeton.

Life's Work

John Kemeny recruited Kurtz to the Dartmouth mathematics department, which Kemeny chaired. Kemeny had taught at Princeton until 1953, even living a short distance from Kurtz for a time, but the two did not meet before the recruitment. Kurtz was assigned to liaise with the New England Regional Computer Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The IBM-funded center gave access to northeastern educational institutions. At MIT, Kurtz learned assembly language programming for the IBM 704, the first commercial machine with a magnetic core memory. When Dartmouth bought an LGP-30 in 1959, Kurtz became director of computing. The machine at first attracted only a handful of faculty and student users; Kurtz wanted to give access to the entire student body. Because users could not reserve time but had to give their programs to staff for batch processing, it could take a day to deliver results to users. Kurtz and Kemeny began working on a primitive time-sharing computer, to allow many users to access the computer simultaneously, with the computer running each user's program for short stretches of time. Their first true time-sharing computer, developed with General Electric, went into operation in 1964, and the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS) was born. Kurtz and Kemeny also developed the DTSS to resolve the problem of long delays between runs of a debugging process.

The DTTS was the prototype for university and other organizations' time-sharing systems, quickly adopted across the country. It used the GE-235 as a central processor and a GE Datanet-30 for communications with terminals across the campus. Functions could be as simple as checking out a library book. All Dartmouth students and students from area colleges had unlimited access. Small jobs, more commonly associated with students, had priority over large ones, more typically faculty jobs. Over time, Kurtz and Kemeny simplified the interface so an average student could learn enough in an hour to use the system.

Their work on the DTSS reflected Kurtz and Kemeny's goal of providing a friendly computing experience for all users, especially undergraduates—including those who were not scientifically or mathematically inclined. The first simplified language was the Dartmouth Simplified code (Darsimco), followed by the Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment (DOPE). Beginning in 1963, after seven years, BASIC began to emerge. In 1964, it debuted, gaining rapid acceptance among not only students but also faculty and staff. BASIC, a descendant of the more difficult languages Fortran and ALGOL, was much easier to use. Kurtz and Kemeny relied heavily on undergraduate programmers for support. They included BASIC in the two introductory courses that most undergraduates took, and they required that all students write a program as part of the course. BASIC commands are based in English and thus intuitive and transparent: SAVE, RUN, END, PRINT, and so on. BASIC spread through a grassroots movement to high schools, colleges, and businesses—and new varieties of BASIC began to emerge and spread as well.

The original BASIC, although copyrighted, was free to all. Because hundreds of iterations developed, there was incompatibility and chaos. Kurtz and Kemeny wanted to remove the bad reputation that some of the poor versions were giving BASIC. In 1974, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) began seeking a voluntary standard; the minimal standard would appear in 1978 and the full standard in 1984. Kurtz chaired the subcommittee on standardization and took the opportunity to improve BASIC while meeting the new specifications.

Kemeny and Kurtz had written the original version of BASIC from scratch. Their BASIC offered matrix manipulation, local variables, advanced graphics, and features that other BASIC versions lacked. They were naturally embarrassed by the simplistic imitators of the early versions, the ones they had long surpassed, especially when the dumbed-down clones became standard on virtually every computer, from personal computer (PC) to mainframe. BASIC became passé as critics defined it, based on the impostors, as out of date. To keep really bad versions of BASIC from entering the standardization competition, Kurtz and Kemeny put together True BASIC. In 1983, Kurtz, Kemeny, and others established True BASIC, Inc., to sell True BASIC to schools and colleges. The price was to be low enough to allow widespread use. Testing began at Dartmouth, with the first version intended for an IBM PC and versions for other brands to be issued each quarter thereafter. True BASIC included the capacity for structured programming, which allows the writing of small and clear segments (subroutines) and use of those segments to build larger programs. True BASIC also has a graphics module that makes picture drawing on a monitor easier. True BASIC was powerful but simple enough for a beginner, thus holding the same value as the original.

First on the market with the only ANSI standard, Kurtz and Kemeny sold a sampler edition. This $14.95 version was available for any PC-compatible or Macintosh machine, and it included a full version of the language, capability to create files up to 150 lines, and a paperback book by Kurtz and Kemeny that explained BASIC in 208 pages. The handbook ignored Microsoft, making conversion difficult but not giving publicity to a competitor. True BASIC differed from other BASICS: It had a background program compiler capability like QuickBASIC, so it was fast and convenient. It was strong in mathematics and string handling. However, it had a clunky environment, not up to the quality of more sophisticated menu-driven alternatives.

Kurtz retired from teaching at Dartmouth in 1993. Aside from his teaching duties, Kurtz was director of Dartmouth's Kiewit Computation Center from 1966 to 1975 and director of the Office of Academic Computing from 1975 to 1978. Between 1974 and 1984, he chaired the American National Standards Institute committee to develop a standard BASIC; this was the period during which he and Kemeny formed True BASIC, Inc. and promoted it for standardization of BASIC. Kurtz was also the director of the Computer and Information Systems program at Dartmouth from 1980 to 1988. He worked as principal investigator for a variety of National Science Foundation programs that promoted computing in education, and he was active in other bodies devoted to using computing in teaching, including the Pierce Panel of the President's Scientific Advisory Committee. From 1987 to 1994, he was with the International Standards Organization's working group on an international BASIC standard.

In Kurtz's honor, Dartmouth instituted a Thomas E. Kurtz Chair in the William H. Neukom Academic Cluster in Computational Science, devoted to exploring the computational and engineering principles of intelligence, in 2015.

In 2021, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) dedicated an IEEE Milestone marker at Dartmouth's Collis Center to recognize it as the site where BASIC was created. The dedication took place on February 22, Kurtz's birthday.

Personal Life

Kurtz regarded his work as his life. He and Kemeny coauthored Basic Statistics (published in 1963) and BASIC Programming (published in 1967).

Kurtz held an honorary degree from Knox College (1985) and was named a Computer Pioneer by the IEEE in 1991. He became a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1994 and of the IEEE in 2023.

Bibliography

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