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Programming

Thomas E. Kurtz, Co-Inventor of BASIC, Dies At 96 (hackaday.com) 44

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.

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

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

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  • 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.

  • 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.

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

      There, FTFY.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      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: (Score:2)

        by vbdasc ( 146051 )

        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.

      • 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.

  • 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:4, 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.

  • Been using BASIC my whole life (Score:3)

    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:2)

      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

  • > 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.

  • 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 ther

    • 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

    • 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.

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

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