Long before you were picking up Python and JavaScript, in the predawn darkness of May 1, 1964, a modest but pivotal moment in computing history unfolded at Dartmouth College. Mathematicians John G.

Surely BASIC is properly obsolete by now, right? Perhaps not. In addition to inspiring a large part of home computing today, BASIC is still very much alive today, even outside of retro computing.

Thomas E. Kurtz, who translated the exhilarating power of computer science in the 1960s as the coinventor of BASIC, a programming language that replaced inscrutable numbers and glyphs with intuitive ...

Adapted from A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin. Out now from Harvard University Press. In the 1960s, Dartmouth College became ground zero for the coming explosion ...

It’s with sadness that we note the passing of Thomas E. Kurtz, on November 12th. He was co-inventor of the BASIC programming language back in the 1960s, and though his creation may not receive the ...