Thomas Eugene Kurtz, cofounder of True BASIC, Inc., was a professor of mathematics and computer science at Dartmouth College for thirty-seven years. During that time, he and John G. Kemeny, with whom he collaborated on many projects, designed and developed the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS) and the computer programming language, Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, or BASIC. For those accomplishments, Kurtz and Kemeny received the first Pioneer's Day award from the American Federation of Information Processing Society in 1974.
Kurtz was born on February 22, 1928, in Oak Park, Illinois, to Oscar Christ Kurtz, who worked in various capacities at the International Lion's Club headquarters, and Helen Bell Kurtz. Interested in science from his youth, Kurtz entered Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, with the intention of majoring in physics. He also took all of the mathematics courses available. Following the suggestion of an adviser to consider a career in statistics, which would allow him the opportunity to apply his mathematical skills to many different scientific problems, Kurtz switched majors in his senior year and graduated in 1950 with a B.A. in mathematics.
Kurtz earned his graduate education at Princeton University, where his interest in computing was forged by Forman Acton, a professor of engineering. Acton made it possible for him to spend the summer of 1951 at the Institute of Numerical Analysis, a branch of the National Bureau of Standards located on the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) campus. There, in addition to attending lectures on computing, Kurtz interacted with a number of the early computer pioneers, many of whom frequented UCLA during the summer.
From 1952 to 1956, Kurtz served as a research assistant in the Analytical Research Group at Princeton, where he wrote programs to help solve classified research problems, such as those concerned with the effectiveness of air-to-air rocket salvos. The programs were run on an IBM Card Programmed Calculator, and occasionally his job involved tending the machine throughout the night, transferring cards from the output bin back to the input hopper.
Upon graduating from Princeton in 1956 with a Ph.D. in mathematical statistics, Kurtz was recruited by John G. Kemeny, who was chair of Dartmouth's mathematics department. Though Kemeny had previously taught at Princeton until 1953, and had even lived a short distance away from Kurtz at one point, the two scientists had not met before Kurtz was recruited. One of Kurtz's first assignments was as liaison to the New England Regional Computer Center, which had been established at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with funding from IBM and had the provision that educational institutions in the northeast could have access to its facilities. Kurtz spent August of 1956 at MIT, learning assembly language programming--the language that the machine understands--for the center's IBM 704, which was the first commercially available machine with a magnetic core memory.
In 1959 Dartmouth finally purchased its own computer, an LGP-30, and Kurtz was appointed director of computing. Initially, the computer was used by just a small fraction of the Dartmouth student body and faculty, but Kurtz felt that all students should be able to use the computing facilities. One of the drawbacks to the widespread use of computers in the late 1950s was that users could not reserve time on a given machine, but had to submit their programs to be processed. The computer would run each request in the order it was received and then store the result. Such "batch processing" meant that users had to wait as much as a day or more to see their results, so that debugging a program could turn into a lengthy and frustrating process. "Time sharing," which allows many people to use a computer simultaneously by having the computer work on each person's problem for short periods of time, avoided the delay, but general-purpose time sharing systems were not available.
In February of 1964, Kurtz and Kemeny began developing a time sharing computer system with the General Electric Corporation. Completed in June, the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, one of the first general-purpose systems of its kind, was comprised in part of one GE-235, which served as the central processors, as well a GE Datanet-30, which handled communications with terminals all over campus. The goal of the project was to make access to computing as simple as checking out a book in the college library. It gave all Dartmouth students, as well as students from area colleges and schools, access to the computer whenever they wished, without the bureaucratic obstacles of forms, permission, and restricted hours. To ensure that this democratic approach worked in practice, the computer gave precedence to small jobs (typically student's programs) as opposed to large ones (typically those submitted by the faculty).
Having removed one of the primary barriers to computer use, Kurtz and Kemeny went on to simplify the user interface, so that a student could essentially learn enough to use the system in an hour or less. But writing programs in the computer languages then in use was a more challenging task. Though Kurtz initially tried to simplify certain existing languages, namely Algol and FORTRAN, Kurtz and Kemeny decided that a new, simplified programming language was needed. The resulting programming language was called Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, or BASIC, and has become the most widely used language in the world. In 1983, Kurtz, Kemeny and several others formed True BASIC, Inc., with the intention of creating a personal computer version of BASIC for educational purposes.
Between stints as professor of mathematics and computing at Dartmouth, Kurtz served as director of the Kiewit Computation Center from 1966 to 1975, director of the Office of Academic Computing from 1975 to 1978, and vice-chair, 1979 to 1983, and chair, 1983 to 1988, of the Program in Computer and Information Science. Over the years, Kurtz served as principal investigator for various projects supported by the National Science Foundation to promote the use of computers in education. He also participated in many other activities related to the use of computing in teaching, including the Pierce Panel of the President's Scientific Advisory Committee.
From 1974 to 1984, Kurtz chaired a committee of the American National Standards Institute, devoted to developing a national standard for BASIC, which by then existed in many incompatible forms. He served from 1987 to 1994 as convener of an International Standards Organization working group, concerned with developing an international standard for BASIC. Kurtz received an honorary degree from Knox College in 1985, was recognized as a Computer Pioneer by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1991, and was made a Fellow of the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) in 1994.
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