Thomas kurtz of lackey high school dies

Programming one was the province of scientists and mathematicians, specialists who understood the nonintuitive commands used to manipulate data through the hulking machines, which processed data in large batches, an effort that sometimes took days or weeks to complete. Kurtz and John G. Kurtz said in an interview for Dartmouth in It replaced a system under which one person had to reserve time to use the computer and relinquish it before the next person could use it.

But the architecture of a system for sharing resources was not enough. Kurtz and Dr. Kemeny recalled Dr. Kurtz saying. It was a high-level programming language designed for ease of use, which could be used with the time-sharing system. The name for the language originated from Kurtz's wish to have a simple acronym that meant something as well.

In an open letter, he reiterated upon past statements that BASIC was invented to give students a simple programming language that was easy to learn, as all the current languages of the time were dedicated to professionals. In addition, because the language was not designed as a structured languageit made it difficult to split programs into separate parts to improve maintainability.

A commemorative plaque was placed on February 22, True BASIC featured structured programming constructs such as a do-loop and else-if and support for multiple operating systems. And, as it turned out, the concept of time-sharing as a more efficient way to access a computer in terms of people-time, if not in computer-time was just coming into being at MIT and Carnegie-Mellon.

I was the director of the computer center. It and BASIC were rolled out in and marked a real change in computing — and also put Dartmouth on the global map for the new and exciting world of software and computers. Microsoft also moved further and further away from the original with Visual Basic, until a final break occurred with Visual Basic.

NET in InKurtz withdrew from public commitments and devoted himself to teaching mathematics until his retirement in He is survived by his wife Agnes, 3 children, 9 grandchildren and 17 great-grandchildren. This article was originally published in German.