Thomas Kurtz, co-inventor of BASIC computer language, dies at 96
His programming language replaced inscrutable numbers and glyphs with intuitive commands, translating the exhilarating power of computer science.


Thomas E. Kurtz, at left, with his colleague John Kemeny. (Courtesy of Trustees of Dartmouth College)

By Emily Langer
November 19, 2024 at 10:13 p.m. EST

Thomas E. Kurtz, who translated the exhilarating power of computer science in the 1960s as the coinventor of BASIC, a programming language that replaced inscrutable numbers and glyphs with intuitive commands, died Nov. 12 at a hospice center in Lebanon, New Hampshire. He was 96. ... The cause was multiple organ failure from sepsis, said his wife, Aggie Kurtz.

Dr. Kurtz was originally trained in mathematics and statistics — not in computer science — because computer science scarcely existed as a field when he began his career as a professor at Dartmouth College in 1956. ... Along with John G. Kemeny, the chairman of the mathematics department and later the university’s president, Dr. Kurtz was widely credited with helping transform computer science from a rarefied preserve of experts into a field that novices could explore and understand.

The computers that existed at the time — unrecognizable to people who have grown up with laptops, tablets and smartphones — were so big that they occupied entire rooms. Use of computers was limited to government departments, universities and large corporations that could afford the behemoth machines and, within those institutions, to the relatively few people schooled in programming languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL. ... Those languages, however impressive for their time, were highly complex and effectively inaccessible to people without advanced training.

Dr. Kurtz and Kemeny, however, were determined to make time on Dartmouth’s computer — the university had a single machine — as easily available to students as the university’s library collections. As Dr. Kurtz once told the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California: “Lecturing about computing doesn’t make any sense, any more than lecturing on how to drive a car makes sense.”

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By Emily Langer
Emily Langer is a reporter on The Washington Post’s obituaries desk. She writes about extraordinary lives in national and international affairs, science and the arts, sports, culture, and beyond. She previously worked for the Outlook and Local Living sections.follow on X @emilylangerWP