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Programming

Thomas E. Kurtz, Co-Inventor of BASIC, Dies At 96 (hackaday.com) 77

Posted by BeauHD from the rest-in-peace dept.
Slashdot readers damn_registrars and GFS666 share the news of the passing of Thomas E. Kurtz, co-inventor of the BASIC programming language back in the 1960s. He was 96. Hackaday reports: The origins of BASIC lie in the Dartmouth Timesharing System, like similar timesharing operating systems of the day, designed to allow the resources of a single computer to be shared across many terminals. In this case the computer was at Dartmouth College, and BASIC was designed to be a language with which software could be written by average students who perhaps didn't have a computing background. In the decade that followed it proved ideal for the new microcomputers, and few were the home computers of the era which didn't boot into some form of BASIC interpreter. Kurtz continued his work as a distinguished academic and educator until his retirement in 1993, but throughout he remained as the guiding hand of the language.
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Thomas E. Kurtz, Co-Inventor of BASIC, Dies At 96 More

Thomas E. Kurtz, Co-Inventor of BASIC, Dies At 96

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  • No problem! (Score:3)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @02:07AM (#64959163)

    10 PRINT "I'M ALIVE!"
    20 GOTO 10

    I expect the man to respawn very soon.

  • 10 REM THE GOOD OLD DAYS
    20 GOTO 10

    My second language (after FORTRAN on the /360) ca. 1972 on HP-2000 TSB.

  • I first used Basic on the DTS back in '74. Connecting via a 300 baud (I think) teletype. It was great! It allowed you to write code solving problems and perform studies without being distracted having to know what was going on under the hood. Contrast that with the analog computing class I took around the same time. Solving differential equations in real time was amazing, but dealing with the circuits and scaling could be a distraction.
  • It is all ALGOL to me, but I do think BASIC was (and still is) a very useful tool in its day. There are indeed still pretty good BASIC interpreters floating around. My favourite is Liberty BASIC which is still actively maintained https://www.libertybasic.com/ [libertybasic.com]

    • I learned a tiny bit of basic when I was 13 years old or so. It was cool to work with and I liked it. I'm curious how you think it might still be useful - what kinds of things are you thinking people can be doing with it? Does anybody use it for anything currently? what kinds of current-day things would Basic be best for? It would be fun to go back and putter around with it again.

      • Excel macros mostly. Though Office Script is replacing it.

      • Well, Liberty BASIC can still do everything Visual BASIC did way back when. Since it can do PEEK and POKE, I have used it to control some devices through a USB-Serial port and give it a nice looking front end.
      • Modern BASIC instead of using line numbers, has been upgraded to use syntactically significant whitespace. It's still used to teach beginning programmers. They changed the name but it still causes brain damage.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by caseih ( 160668 )

          I've never seen a BASIC dialect that used significant whitespace. Modern BASIC is more like PASCAL for syntax and structure. Line numbers are definitely a thing of the past and GOTO and GOSUB are largely deprecated in favor of DO or WHILE and SUBs and FUNCTIONs. Some dialects require declaring variables with types. Something like "Dim myvar as Integer". And they include pointer facilities so interacting with C libraries is quite easy. The number one feature of any modern BASIC dialect is dynamic strings

          • I've never seen a BASIC dialect that used significant whitespace. Modern BASIC is more like PASCAL for syntax and structure. Line numbers are definitely a thing of the past and GOTO and GOSUB are largely deprecated in favor of DO or WHILE and SUBs and FUNCTIONs.

            Oh, they have a new website, it's right here [python.org]. Good language for beginners, but line numbers were better.

        • At Dartmouth we had to use TrueBasic for several classes, given the long history and a business relationship the College had with them.

          We CS nerds found Perl 4 and never looked back.

          TrueBasic did have a small GUI toolkit, though, for plotting your Calculus homework.

          I somewhat resented having a perfectly good 486 in my dorm room and having to trudge through snow to use TrueBasic on a Mac Plus in a computer lab, ngl.

          The Legacy kids got all the close dorms.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kackle ( 910159 )
        In Visual Basic 6, I just wrote a QR-code label printer for use in our factory for an upcoming product's manufacturing run. Why? I already know the tool/language, so I was able to write it quickly. I assume other languages could be used, but I knew HOW to do so in VB6, I just had to do it. If I tried to use C or Python or language du jour, I wouldn't know the conceptual route to write to a label printer, stuck before I even started coding.

        If I had to do something simple that was cross-platform, I'd

      • The BASIC of the day was interactive. Type a command get a result . And very very simple commands too. For example, the original IBM PC (8088, before even the AT or XT), just turn on the computer, and start typing, because BASIC was in ROM. Most languages, even beginner oriented ones, aren't quite like that. Sure, Python and Lisp may be interactive but they're extremely complex in comparison to BASIC. Even Visual BASIC is nothing at all like BASIC.

        But BASIC is too... basic... to really do much. Once

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by caseih ( 160668 )

      There are also excellent full compilers out there. I think the best is FreeBASIC [freebasic.net].

      If you pine for QuickBASIC, there's a modern compiler and IDE that implements nearly the exact same dialect: QB64 [qb64.com]. The QuickBASIC IDE was excellent and QB64 implements it fairly faithfully, but with color syntax highlighting!

      And Kurtz's TrueBASIC [truebasic.com] is still a thing.

    • BBC Basic is also interesting. Looks so old school!

    • BASIC was essentially a type of assembly language in many ways. Zero structure, zero declarations, etc. And you can't even say it was the product of the times, because high level programming languages absolutely existed at the time, even on the Dartmouth Timeshare System. The big thing though was that BASIC was great mostly for being highly applicable to extremely tiny microcomputers, without the space necessary for a compiler, parser, etc.

      I think it was only a beginner's language in the sense that it was

  • We have to thank BASIC for Microsoft. The company's first significant business was implementing BASIC on MITS Altair and any other microcomputer during the later half of the 1970s.

    • Re:Don't forget that (Score:4, Funny)

      by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @04:40AM (#64959289)

      We have to curse the living shit out of BASIC to hell and back for Microsoft

      There, FTFY.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ewhac ( 5844 )

      Microsoft weren't the only ones doing it, though. And, foreshadowing the entire history of their products, it was mid at best.

      This was my favorite BASIC [sol20.org] of the time. Of particular note:

      • Multiple-line user-defined functions. Most BASICs of the time only supported DEF FN for simple, single-line algebraic expressions.
      • Matrix math and manipulations.
      • On-screen line editing, years before the Commodore PET did it.
      • LIST output was block-indented.

      Don't snark too heavily on BASIC. It's what got tens of thousan

      • Re:Don't forget that (Score:4, Interesting)

        by vbdasc ( 146051 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @06:05AM (#64959401)

        Don't snark too heavily on BASIC. It's what got tens of thousands of people started on the path.

        Famous quotes from Professor E. W. Dijkstra:

        It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

        The teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery.

        My first CS teacher, who taught me Pascal, loved these two quotes :)

        P.S. R.I.P. to the Professor Kurtz, though. In my anti-Basic zeal, I forgot to say this important thing. Also, I'm sure he didn't mean bad when he created Basic... The Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS) that he helped create is a marvelous piece of work and it definitely pushed computing forward.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ewhac ( 5844 )

          My first CS teacher, who taught me Pascal, loved these two quotes :) [ emphasis mine ]

          Oy...

          Don't get me started on Pascal. It was the "heir apparent" of compiled languages before C escaped from UC Berkeley/Bell Labs and left it in the dust, for the simple reason that C was much more pleasant to use, and understood that you were programming a real machine, not some mathematically pure abstraction. (That whole thing with the semicolons really burnt my bacon...)

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by caseih ( 160668 )

          Much prefer modern BASIC to PASCAL. Similar syntax but much less verbose and easier to type. BASIC does have some warts, and they don't have anything to do with GOTO or line numbers.

          One wart with BASIC that persists to this day is the use of the '=' operator to indicate both assignment and equality, depending on where it was used in an expression. I don't love the pascal := syntax but it does solve the problem well (better than C's = and ==).

          Another BASIC wart is that traditionally it had no logical oper

          • Ugh... I remember thinking how this was a badly designed language when I was a kid

            DIM array(1)
            array(0) = 1
            array(1) = 2
            array(2) = 3
            print array(0)
            print array(1)
            print array(2)

            1
            2
            index out of range line 6

      • My favourite at the time was BBC Basic, by virtue of being the sole BASIC I had access to.

        Nonetheless it's pretty good, especially for 1981 on an 8 bit home micro. And honestly Q(uick)Basic was pretty sodding awesome. It was legitimately good, especially with the combo of the built in IDE with debugger and help etc.

        Don't snark too heavily on BASIC. It's what got tens of thousands of people started on the path.

        Indeed. Lots of people like to shit on it, but I think that's a tribal thing at this point.

    • As mentioned in the summary, BASIC was invented in the first half of the 1960s, before the existence of Microsoft. Microsoft is certainly to thank for BASIC remaining a popular language well into the 2000s, though.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dadoo ( 899435 )

      We have to thank BASIC for Microsoft.

      Sadly, you're probably right. I still have an OSI C4P, from roughly 1978. It prints the following message when it boots:

      OSI 6502 BASIC VERSION 1.0 REV 3.2
      COPYRIGHT 1977 BY MICROSOFT CO.

      If you actually look in the BASIC ROM, it says "WRITTEN BY RICHARD W. WEILAND".

  • Dartmouth? (Score:3)

    by dwater ( 72834 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @04:56AM (#64959311)

    I didn't realise there was anything other than navy there. Cool. I'm surprised this came out of the uk though, but, yeah!

  • Ah... my childhood. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Petersko ( 564140 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @05:15AM (#64959333)

    When I was 14 years old I had my first program published in Compute's Gazette. It was in BASIC. I can draw a direct line from that moment through my entire career into my early retirement this July. Badmouth BASIC all you like. My VIC-20, bought with money I earned delivering newspapers for eight months, shaped my life.

    If I went back to code in BASIC again today I might still reflexively drop white space and let the parser chunk it up to save the bytes...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I started at 8 and had trouble spelling the keywords. Got some books from the library to learn from. By the time we started using computers at school I knew more than the teachers.

      As part of our history class we had a stock trading game set in the 1920s. It was supposed to teach you why the stock market crashed, but it was written in BBC BASIC so gave myself an extra hundred million dollars, and then lost most of it.

    • I remember writing BASIC programs in longhand during boring church and then transcribing them to the Apple II+ when I got home. What a dork.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kalpol ( 714519 )
      Pretty much the same story, VIC-20 and all (except we won ours in a drawing, or something like that). That was the hardest working 3.5KB of my life. I sitll have a VIC system around, I just never got a good video link working for it. Project for retirement.
      POKE 36879,20

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by neoRUR ( 674398 )

      Same here, started programming it on an Apple II+, I worked all summer long to make the money to buy in 1980. Did what I could programming it in BASIC, adventure games with graphics screens you that would pop up to show the story. I remember we used to Ctrl-C games and then change some of the data and continue it again. It was friendly cheating in a multiplayer, on same apple, space game, when the other person was in the other room ;) The founding Generation of the computer revolution is passing their way i

  • Been using BASIC my whole life (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Spacejock ( 727523 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @05:21AM (#64959345)
    I've been writing and publishing sofware and apps written in BASIC since the late 80's (and tinkered with it before that on Sinclair and Atari ST machines). Multi-user accounting software with task switching on PC-XTs, share market software for Windows 98/XP, novel-writing software for anything up to and including Windows 11, Android and IOS apps, MacOS software, you name it.

    In my (long) experience users don't give a damn what their software is written in as long as it's fast, effective and free of bugs. It's not about the programming language, it's all about the programmer(s) you hire in the first place.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      People really miss the word "language" in there.

      Do you care if your speaker system was "made" using the Chinese language? Taiwanese? Outer Monogolian? No. So long as the interface that you deal with is in a language you understand, the product works the same way.

      If you're a programmer, and you speak the language they used, you can understand the internal workings, contribute back, fix things, etc.

      But does the language matter? No. It's like refusing a train because it was built by a French speaker. Un

      • But when we start getting into language wars, it's exactly like people bickering over whether German or French is "better". It's a nonsense

        Exactly, because German isn't a real language, it's fake! [youtube.com]

        (As a non native speaker sharing my home with three native speakers, I can only say, this is my story and I'm sticking with it...)

  • > GOTO HEAVEN
    UNDEFINED LINE ERROR
    > GOTO HELL
    UNDEFINED LINE ERROR

  • It must have been around 1986, when I was around 15 years or so, that I learned Basic on my Commodore C64. I had gotten it as a birthday present from my parents and it was amazing.

    Initially it had no storage drive since the VC1541 was kind of expensive. So I learned to write programs on it with the help of the manual. Only a few games to distract me. Just writing these programs and learning to organize my code was something I could do for hours and hours.

    Needless to say that unbeknownst to me I am like many

  • Sorry, but I immediately thought of that famous phrase at the climax of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
  • Most of the microcomputer's BASIC came from Microsoft. By the time Japan produced a version (MSX), PCs and Microsoft had moved to compilers.

    While BASIC was the first language I learnt, I didn't do anything serious until Microsoft released QuickBASIC. I wrote a simple diff utility, and something to change the money resource in a Privateer save-game.

  • VB .. Visual Basic (Score:3)

    by nosfucious ( 157958 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @08:08AM (#64959569)

    Visual Basic (VB) is essentially the thing which consigned COBOL to the museum (yes, still a lot of it out there, valuable and nearly irreplaceable). Whether VB directly or in Access or Excel.

    Millions upon millions of lines of business logic implemented in VB in the late 90's and early 2000's. That was the great productivity boost (and if you ask me, the time that the great leap forward for executive pay versus drone worker salary stagnation).

    I am willing to bet that there is a lot of VB code still out there, still running. There will be a lot of money to be made one day in decompiling that and making updates, or porting.

    That is a significant legacy to leave. (If it is a great legacy, not sure, but it certainly is A legacy).

    • There's definitely still a ton of VB stuff out there. Moreover, VBA is the same language and Microsoft is struggling to smother it slowly enough to not have a repeat of when they tried to shove .NET down everyone's throats by completely abandoning the VB1-6 line for something entirely different with essentially zero compatibility similar only in name and some keywords. .NET is widely used, but they lost massive market share in the niche VB had completely dominated.
      It was surprising no one even tried to pic

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by KlomDark ( 6370 )
        > I'm a big fan of the project, having been stubbornly sticking to VB6 for most purposes these last 25y.

        Oh you poor tortured soul! I spent many years in VB (from VB3 to VB6) and then progressed to VB.net. But after shifting to C# 20 years ago, I wouldn't want to go back. BASIC has a soft spot in my heart as that's where I got started (PET/V20/C64 BASIC) but I hope I never have to code in it again.

    • People are still writing COBOL on purpose, but nobody is still writing BASIC unless they have to because it's the only automation language for some application they have to use. The only BASIC I've written in decades was for Crystal Reports, mostly because it wouldn't calculate a median for you. You literally had to write a sort function because they didn't provide that either, talk about pathetic. Nobody should have to write code just to calculate a median in a program whose job is reporting.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by labnet ( 457441 )

      I would argue it consigned Pascal to the museum, as Borland Turbo Pascal was the real competitor to VB6 as they were both RAD GUI platforms.
      I wrote a commercial scientific software in VB6 back in the day and it worked fine (although the math heavy stuff was in C). While I now primarily program in C# and C, I have no hate for Basic or VB.
      I never liked COBOL though.

  • Does he now to go the celestial realms or the infernal realms? Only the Lords of COBOL know.

  • I still remember the "Mr Bojangles" sprite demonstration program and the other programs I manually copied from a 3 ring binder full of basic listings that came with the hand me down TI-99 4/A I got for my birthday in 1986. Then I started modifying those listings, and one time I had the machine make garish noises while printing block inverse text on a continuous loop and my dad walked in and saw this and told me to turn it off because he literally thought the computer was going to catch on fire!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kackle ( 910159 )
      That's funny and believable. I remember we bought a video game cartridge in the 1970s that had a minor bug in it. My father returned it, thinking that the replacement wouldn't be "broken". Even as a kid, I suspected that the new cartridge would have the same problem...because "it's software".

  • Thank you (Score:3)

    by ElizabethGreene ( 1185405 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @12:36PM (#64960111)

    Thank you very much for your work, Mr. Kurtz.

    We never met, but you bent the curve of my life.

    • I think this is a comment that's sums up a lot of the posts in here. Like many others BASIC was the first language I used, and as a kid it let me build shitty Zork-like games, but more importantly develop an interest in computers and learn how programming works.

      Does anyone know if there's a public platform where one can post a tribute? The funeral homes typically have a website, but Google gives me a bunch of Thomas Kurtz, none of which are right. His family probably knows, but it'd be neat to be able to

    • Yes indeed. We all love to hate BASIC these days, but it was the first stepping stone into programming for many of us.

  • I wrote a vector drawing program in Ti-Basic on my Ti-99/4a (16k RAM!) in 1980. It could only do straight line drawings that were a string of x,y start and end coordinates. I used it to draw dungeons and later starship floor plans (Traveller). I also came up with a way to save these drawings into a file that had an interface to search for ships matching one or more keywords. I was 11-12 years old at the time and didn't even know I had invented applications. I just like creating plans and calling them up aga

  • 190 PRINT "RIP"
    199 END

  • The last programming project from Bill Gates was microsoft basic for the trs 80 computer.


    I remember the movie TRON coming out - On my TRS80 - TRON was a BASIC command - TRACE ON ... to debug code and see what line number was running. Made me smile knowlingly as a baby nerd. The stop command - TROFF hasn't been made into a movie...yet.

    I had my folks send my Tandy TRS80 COCO away to a factory for a BIOS update just to get the RENUM command, which would modify the line numbers to get you more sweet

  • GOSUB was my GOTO.

    I did modular programming before it became fashionable.

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