Thomas e kurtz biography channels

Thomas E. Kurtz, a Dartmouth College professor who co-created the novice-friendly computer code known as Basic during the s and helped make it the industry.

Born February 22, , Oak Park, Ill. Kemeny in as an instructor. Around , Kurtz and John G. Kemeny began jointly to supervise the design and development of a time-sharing system for university use. The idea to use time-sharing to reach all Dartmouth students came from John McCarthy who, around , advised, "you guys ought to do time-sharing.

Although other languages such as Fortran and Algol were provided, the principal language was BASIC, which was deliberately designed to be easy to learn and easy to use. Subsequently, Kurtz served as the director of the Kiewit Computation Center from to , and as director of the Office of Academic Computing from to In he and Stephen J. Garland organized a professional master's program in Computer and Information Systems, funded in part with a grant from IBM.

Upon termination of the CIS program in , Kurtz returned to teaching. He retired from Dartmouth College in Kemeny, John G. Kurtz, Thomas E. Kemeny, J. Thomas E. All rights reserved.