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Title: Thomas E. Kurtz, Co-Inventor of BASIC, Dies At 96

Link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/24/11/2...

Slashdot readers damn_registrars and GFS666 share the news of the passing of
Thomas E. Kurtz, co-inventor of the BASIC programming language back in the
1960s. He was 96. Hackaday reports: 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.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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