BASIC wasn’t designed to change the world. “We were thinking only of Dartmouth,” says Kurtz, its surviving co-creator. (Kemeny died in 1992.) “We needed a language that could be ‘taught ...

Way back before the days of microcomputers, a few very lucky students first got their hands wet with microcomputer trainers. These simple devices used common logic chips, lights, and switches to pe… ...

BASIC converted the user’s whole string of plain-English inputs in a single shot—allowing simple programs to be completed in under a second. Kemeny and Kurtz flipped the switch on the first ...

BBC Basic did a lot of things, and often quite well. During the early 1980s, it extended the BASIC languages with easier loop structures, like IF/THEN/ELSE, and ran faster than Microsoft's version.

Thomas E. Kurtz, a Dartmouth College professor who co-created the novice-friendly computer code known as Basic during the ...

Long before the days of laptops and smartphones, Thomas E. Kurtz worked to give more students access to computers. That work helped propel generations into a new world. Kurtz has died at 96.