Professor Thomas Kurtz, Developer of the Programming Language 'BASIC', Passes Away

Thomas E. Kurtz, a former professor at Dartmouth College in the United States and co-developer of the computer programming language 'Basic,' passed away on the 12th, according to major foreign media reports on the 15th.

Thomas E. Kurtz, former professor at Dartmouth College, USA. Photo by Yonhap News

Born in 1928, he earned a Ph.D. in statistics from Princeton University at the age of 28 and then worked as a statistics instructor at Dartmouth College.

At that time, John Kemeny, the head of the mathematics department at Dartmouth College, and Kurtz developed the programming language Basic, which implemented the concept of time-sharing, and it was put into operation on May 1, 1964. Although programming languages such as 'Fortran' and 'Algol' created by IBM existed then, they were too complex and could only be used by experts.

In 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who were attending Harvard University, created 'Microsoft Basic,' which could run on personal computers, leading to a rapid increase in Basic's popularity. Basic was used as a fundamental programming language until the 1990s when programming languages like 'Pascal' and 'C' became widespread.

After retiring from Dartmouth College in 1993, Kurtz devoted himself to updating 'True Basic,' an upgraded version of the Basic language.

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