Thomas E. Kurtz, a pioneering mathematician at Dartmouth and an inventor of the simplified computer programming language known as BASIC, which allowed students to easily operate early computers and eventually propelled generations into the world of personal computing, died on Tuesday in Lebanon, N.H. He was 96.
The cause of his death, in a hospice, was multiple organ failure from sepsis, said Agnes Kurtz, his wife.
In the early 1960s, before the days of laptops and smartphones, a computer was the size of a small car and an institution like Dartmouth, where Dr. Kurtz taught, had just one. 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.
Dr. Kurtz and John G. Kemeny, then the chairman of Dartmouth’s math department, believed that students would increasingly come to depend on computers and would benefit from understanding how to use them.
“We had the crazy idea that our students, our undergraduate students who are not going to be technically employed later on, social sciences and humanities students, should learn how to use the computer,” Dr. Kurtz said in an interview for Dartmouth in 2014. “Completely nutty idea.”
The two mathematicians created the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, which allowed multiple users to share the processing power of a single computer simultaneously. 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.
“It was more about making computers usable by all sorts of people, who didn’t have a technical background,” John McGeachie, who helped build the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, said in an interview.
But the architecture of a system for sharing resources was not enough. Dr. Kurtz and Dr. Kemeny also wanted to give students an easier platform for understanding how the computers worked and functioned, and to allow them to code and run their own programs on Dartmouth’s computer.
“I think we could design a completely different way of using computers that would make it possible to give computer instruction to hundreds of students,” Dr. Kemeny recalled Dr. Kurtz saying. Dr. Kemeny called the proposal “radical.”
Dr. Kemeny, who later became Dartmouth’s 13th president, worked with Dr. Kurtz and undergraduate students to develop a novice-friendly and intuitive computer language called BASIC (the name was an acronym for Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). It was a high-level programming language designed for ease of use, which could be used with the time-sharing system.
The language was simple. Typing the command “RUN” would start a program. “PRINT” printed a word or string of letters. “STOP” told the program to stop.
At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall on the Dartmouth campus, the time-sharing system and BASIC were put to a test. A professor and a student programmer typed a simple command — “RUN” — into neighboring Teletype terminals and watched as both received the same answer simultaneously. It worked.
Students could use other popular languages of the time like Algol and Fortran, but BASIC, which required only two one-hour seminars to master the fundamentals, became the language of choice not only for Dartmouth students but also for students learning programming around the globe.
“If Fortran is the lingua franca, then certainly it must be true that BASIC is the lingua playpen,” Dr. Kurtz once said.
The ability to access a computer and have it process data from multiple users at a single time was revolutionary. Allowing those same computer users to easily write their own programs was even bolder.
“In the very early days, if you did something, the computer would just look back at you. BASIC was interactive. You knew right away,” said Charles C. Palmer, a senior lecturer in the computer science program at Dartmouth. “It was a turning point.”
The programming language would provide the intellectual building blocks for later software and is still a fundamental tool in teaching computer programming. One student who later benefited from BASIC was Bill Gates, who used a variation of it as the foundation for the first Microsoft operating systems. Versions of BASIC still power computer operating systems today.
Thomas Eugene Kurtz was born on Feb. 22, 1928, in Oak Park, Ill., to Oscar Christ Kurtz, who worked for Lions Clubs International, editing an in-house publication and later overseeing membership development, and Helen (Bell) Kurtz, who managed the household. He graduated from Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., in 1950 and received a master’s and a doctorate in statistics from Princeton. In 1956, the year he received his doctorate, he was hired by Dr. Kemeny to join the math department at Dartmouth. He spent the rest of his career in Hanover, N.H.
In 1953, Dr. Kurtz married Patricia Barr. The couple had three children and divorced in 1973. He met Agnes Seelye Bixler while hiking, one of his favorite activities outside of his work in computational sciences. They married in 1974.
She survives him, as do his sons, Daniel and Timothy; a daughter, Beth Louise Kurtz; his brother, David; nine grandchildren; and 17 great-grandchildren.
After graduating from Princeton, Dr. Kurtz realized that there was the potential for greater access to computer programming for students beyond the fields of math and engineering. He worked at the summer session of the Institute for Numerical Analysis at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1951 before joining Dartmouth and pursuing time sharing and accessible coding languages.
He served as the director of the Kiewit Computation Center at Dartmouth from 1966 to 1975. In 1979, he and Stephen J. Garland created a professional master’s program in computer and information systems at Dartmouth, funded in part by a grant from IBM.
“He knew this was the up and coming thing,” Dr. Garland, a former student and colleague who helped standardize BASIC with the American National Standards Institute, said in an interview. “Now you call it cloud computing.”
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