How BASIC Revolutionized Programming for Beginners and Shaped Modern Computing

Thomas E. Kurtz, a professor at Dartmouth College, co‑invented the beginner‑friendly programming language BASIC in the 1960s, helping it become an industry standard during the rise of personal computers.

Kurtz died on November 12 at a hospice in Lebanon, New Hampshire, at the age of 96; the obituary was confirmed by his wife Agnes.

BASIC, short for “Beginner’s All‑Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code,” was created by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz to open the world of computing to a broad community.

Kemeny later served as Dartmouth’s president and passed away in 1992.

The duo first introduced the Dartmouth Time‑Sharing System, which gave interested users short access to a General Electric computer purchased in 1964. Unlike MIT’s earlier system, Dartmouth’s version targeted non‑technical users, allowing students from 50 high schools and colleges to connect via telephone terminals.

They then set out to develop a high‑level language for “non‑expert users.” At that time, IBM’s Fortran dominated programming, and Kurtz later recalled that languages such as Fortran and Algol were too complex and full of punctuation rules.

On May 1, 1964, Kemeny and Kurtz launched both the new language and the time‑sharing system.

Easy to Learn

In the 1985 book *Return to BASIC: History, Decline and Future*, Kemeny and Kurtz presented a sample program that illustrates BASIC’s goal of being an easy‑to‑learn universal language:

10 LET X = 5
20 LET Y = 7
30 LET Z = X + Y
40 PRINT Z
50 END

Kurtz explained in a 2014 interview with *Time* that they wanted the language’s syntax to consist of common words with obvious meanings, suggesting that using “HELLO” and “GOODBYE” would be simpler than “LOGON” and “LOGOFF.”

He noted that criticism from computer professionals was partly driven by jealousy. Even Kurtz and Kemeny later criticized later versions of BASIC, including Microsoft BASIC, which helped launch Microsoft as a global software giant.

They argued that many companies, such as Apple and IBM, violated their original design principles, creating a fragmented “street BASIC.” An attempt to create a universal “True BASIC” eventually was abandoned.

Public Domain

The creators chose to place BASIC in the public domain so that it could be widely used without restriction.

Over time, Pascal supplanted BASIC as the preferred language for programmers, and modern operating systems and applications have made explicit programming knowledge unnecessary for most users.

Kurtz told *Time* in 2014 that today many tasks once done in BASIC can be accomplished with spreadsheets or specific applications, and that almost all modern computer functions can be accessed by simply tapping a screen.

Thomas Eugene Kurtz was born on February 22, 1928, in Oak Park, Illinois. He earned his Ph.D. in statistics from Princeton in 1956 and joined Dartmouth’s mathematics department as a statistics lecturer. He directed the Dartmouth Kiewit Computing Center from 1966 to 1975, later overseeing the academic computing office and graduate program in computer and information systems before retiring in 1993.

Kurtz was married twice and had three children with his first wife, Patricia Barl.