Passing of Thomas E. Kurtz (co-creator of BASIC)

[toml_12953]

(11-18-2024 12:13 PM)carey Wrote:  https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-memo...1928-2024/

Yes, it's very sad. He was a brilliant man but he also was a warm human being. I wrote to him several times with questions about TrueBASIC (a language he and John Kemeny wrote to bring BASIC up to modern Dartmouth standards) and he always answered me with the correct answer and more than that, he gave me real world problems to solve and challenged me to solve them in BASIC and send him the resulting program. After I did, he'd write back and we would discuss alternate ways of solving the problem. He seemed to revel in our discussions. Even though I never had a class with him, I learned more about programming from him than I did in five years of college.

RIP, Tom.