[HN Gopher] Thomas E. Kurtz has died
___________________________________________________________________
Thomas E. Kurtz has died
Author : 1986
Score : 470 points
Date : 2024-11-14 22:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (computerhistory.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (computerhistory.org)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_E._Kurtz
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Could we get a black bar for Dr. Kurtz, please?
|
| The legacy of BASIC on our industry can hardly be understated.
| The language and its mission at Dartmouth was innovative.
|
| BASIC had immeasurable secondary effects simply by being the
| first programming language so many new computer users were
| exposed to (particularly near the dawn of personal computers).
|
| Edit: I got sucked into some nostalgia.
|
| Here's the 1964 edition of the Dartmouth BASIC reference:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20120716185629/http://www.bitsave...
|
| It's really charming, and I think it gives you a bit of the feel
| for the time.
|
| (I also particularly like, on page 21, the statement "TYPING IS
| NO SUBSTITUTE FOR THINKING".)
| marsten wrote:
| That manual is a great find! Dr. Kurtz was surely way ahead of
| his time in aiming to bring computing to the masses, well
| before the microcomputer revolution. BASIC was an easy onramp
| to programming that hooked a ton of people on computing,
| especially kids of the 70s/80s like me. He shaped the future as
| much as anyone.
| ghaff wrote:
| The funny thing is that I went undergrad to some big name
| tech school in the late 70s and you barely had access to
| computers without a specific need or for specific coursework.
| (I took FORTRAN using punch cards and a mainframe.) At
| Dartmouth for grad school, access to computing resources was
| much more democratized, even though I was working in material
| science.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| The reason for that is simple. money.
|
| In my first year FORTRAN or cards as you say then the
| University department bought a mini and used BASIC.
| ghaff wrote:
| About the next year the joint computer facility (i.e.
| non-EE/CS) got a VAX but I never had a particular reason
| to get an account.
|
| Looking back, the EECS department was actually a pretty
| active center for computer-related research. But
| computers weren't widely-used elsewhere at the time.
| matwood wrote:
| The legacy was huge for me. As a kid I would type BASIC into
| our TI "computer" that hooked up to our only TV. I was labeling
| cables hoping no one would cut the power. We had no disc drive
| to save what I typed.
|
| Then years later as a college freshman during the dot com boom
| I got my first job writing VB. Literally changed my life and
| put me on a path where I was able to be better off than my
| parents.
| pieter_mj wrote:
| In the manual they have the symbols for zero (0) and the letter
| O switched.
|
| This leads to the statement : F0R X=1 T0 1OO.
|
| Was it really that way back(wards) in 1964?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I suppose it took a day, but there was nothing spookier than
| replying on a different thread only to update with a black bar
| and me frantically trying to figure out what happened over the
| course of a few minutes of my typing.
| zabzonk wrote:
| As someone who learned most pf what I know about programming in
| BASIC back in the very early 1980s, this is sad news. We seem to
| be losing good people all the time these days.
|
| However
| grahamj wrote:
| Damn, learning BASIC was one of the first things I did after my
| dad put together an Apple ][ clone. It paved the way for my
| lifelong technology enthusiasm.
|
| _pours one out_
| dlachausse wrote:
| Like most of the programmers of my generation, BASIC was the
| first language I learned. BASIC was so pervasive in the 80s and
| 90s. Nearly every computer came with a copy of some flavor of
| BASIC. Even my 6th grade math textbook had an appendix with
| educational math games in the form of BASIC source code listings.
|
| So long and thanks for all the fish Dr. Kurtz!
| fuzztester wrote:
| Why "thanks.*fish"? (regex, chill ;)
|
| I know it is a saying, have read it before, but would prefer to
| hear the explanation from a person rather than Google.
| jpc0 wrote:
| Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy
| mmcdermott wrote:
| To add to this, it is revealed in Hitchhikers that dolphins
| are super intelligent extraterrestrials. "So long and
| thanks for all the fish" is the superintelligent dolphins
| farewell to the last of earth/hummanity.
| fuzztester wrote:
| that's rather finny :)
|
| or fishy.
| fuzztester wrote:
| if they are extraterrestrials, wtf are they doing on
| terra, or rather, in / under oceania?
|
| /jk
|
| also, no way they can be superintelligent, if they came
| here, even once. bcoz, u no, shipz propellers, orcas,
| etc.
| schoen wrote:
| I'd say Douglas Adams novels are full of superintelligent
| and/or superpowered entities that don't always think
| things through properly. There's a serious Murphy's Law
| flavor to his scenarios, even if you're the President of
| the Galaxy or the Man Who Rules the Universe or a
| planetary engineer or the most intelligent robot ever
| built or whatever. You're still going to trip and fall,
| or experience unrequited love, or get stranded on a
| boring planet, or have an embarrassing misunderstanding,
| or concoct a wacky scheme that goes wrong somehow.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Given human events, he was not wrong in that conclusion.
| (If we even consider ourselves super intelligent)
| fuzztester wrote:
| astute - you and gp both.
| rswail wrote:
| I thought it was the mice that were the super intelligent
| extraterrestrials?
| markedathome wrote:
| The mice were the mechanism by which the hyper-
| intelligent, pan-dimensional beings observed their
| experiment. The experiment being "what is the Ultimate
| Question?" by running a 10 million year simulation.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I believe we were only the 3rd most intelligent on Earth,
| or something like that? Both dolphins and mouse being
| more intelligent.
| fuzztester wrote:
| Heard of the book, but have not read it, 41 times so far.
| Next time ;)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_(number)
| runevault wrote:
| I ended up using multiple versions of basic because the various
| boot discs we had came with different versions. Off the top of
| my head I remember BASIC, BASICA, and QBASIC. Not that I
| remember the differences between the flavors any more.
| senderista wrote:
| For better or worse, I wouldn't be where I am without this guy.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| 10 PRINT "WE REMEMBER KURTZ" 20 GOTO 10
| nurettin wrote:
| in commodore if you put a comma at the end of the string, it
| will put a space and continue on the same line, providing more
| amusement as it scrolls less regularly. 10
| PRINT "WE REMEMBER KURTZ", 20 GOTO 10
| whyage wrote:
| Learning BASIC on a Commodore 64 as a teenager was a
| transformative experience. It allowed me to revive the excitement
| of playing Lego as a kid, but in a scalable way.
|
| Thank you, Dr. Kurtz.
| smarks wrote:
| Like several others here, my first programming language was
| BASIC. For this we owe Kurtz a debt of gratitude.
|
| I know Dijkstra is famous for having said that we're mentally
| mutilated beyond hope of regeneration, but you know, I kinda
| think we didn't turn out half bad.
| microtherion wrote:
| I know literally zero working programmers who learned
| programming the way Dijkstra thought it should be taught -- not
| even Dijkstra himself, as Donald Knuth once gently pointed out.
|
| Practically everybody in my generation started off with BASIC.
| On the other hand, at some point (when?), this practice
| stopped, and the newer generations turned out fine starting out
| with more civilized languages.
| niteshpant wrote:
| Consider me naive, but what way did Dijkstra thought it
| should be taught? Someone who first learned to code in QBASIC
| themadturk wrote:
| He probably thought programming students should be taught
| Pascal, the academic language he pioneered. It is quite
| different from BASIC.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Pascal was Wirth, not Dijkstra.
| themadturk wrote:
| Sorry, misremembering my meager computing history...
| Zamiel_Snawley wrote:
| "On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science"[0]
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Cruelty_of_Reall
| y_Tea...
| microtherion wrote:
| Dijkstra thought of computer science as a subdomain of
| mathematics, and thought that hands-on experimentation with
| actual computers would mostly lead students astray. A
| program should all be worked out and proven correct before
| (optionally) feeding it to a computer, and testing and even
| more so debugging were abhorrent practices.
|
| BASIC, on the other hand, is more aligned with what Seymour
| Papert later came to call "Constructionism": the student
| learns by experimentation.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| It is the "correct by construction" approach vs the
| "construct by correction" approach.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| That's how it was with CS at Purdue when I was there in
| beginning of the 1990's.
|
| It was Computational Science, not Computer Science, and
| was in the math department.
|
| We did everything wiht pen and paper until I got into my
| 300 level classes and we got access to the NeXT cubes and
| IBM 3090.
|
| I ended up switching to networking and the tech track,
| but it was definitely different...
| systemBuilder wrote:
| Dijkstra was silly because everybody knows that Computer
| Science is the parent field of mathematics.
|
| Mathematics is the study of all O(1) algorithms.
|
| Computer Science is all other algorithms!
| schoen wrote:
| Other commenters are completely right to mention his
| concern for proofs and the "Cruelty of Really Teaching
| Computer Science", but the most BASIC-specific thing that
| he was associated with was criticism of the GOTO statement.
|
| https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.
| p...
|
| In original BASIC, the GOTO is a foundational mechanism and
| a majority of programs would have used it, sometimes
| extensively. Dijkstra thought for many reasons that this
| wasn't good style and didn't promote clear thinking. And
| yes, one consequence of that is that it would be harder to
| prove programs correct or just to reason about whether they
| were correct.
|
| Programs that overuse GOTOs (or from the point of view of
| later structured programming and functional programming
| advocates, perhaps programs that use GOTOs at all) were
| stigmatized as "spaghetti code".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_code
|
| By the way, this concern is not _just_ about aesthetics:
| some of the ideas that Dijkstra was advocating are arguably
| those that newer programming languages like Haskell and
| Rust can use to find bugs in code automatically at compile-
| time, or to make it harder to write certain bugs at all.
| The line between Dijkstra 's advocacy and these techniques
| is complicated but I think there is a connection. So partly
| we might say that Dijkstra was not just concerned with how
| to make it easier for _humans_ to think clearly about
| program correctness, but ultimately also about how to make
| it easier for _computers_ to help humans automatically
| determine (parts of) program correctness. And it 's true
| that the GOTO style complicates that task.
| tinco wrote:
| Kind of ironic that nowadays many people in our
| generation consider the newer generations to be lacking
| fundamental education because they never used GOTO based
| programming languages. I've talked to multiple people who
| lamented that young programmers have never done assembly
| or BASIC.
| numbsafari wrote:
| It's helpful to have a mental model of how the computer
| works. I don't know if it's necessary that one have spent
| mountains of time building real software using a GOTO/jmp
| style, but having exposure to it would be nice, rather
| than hiding it away.
|
| Jeff Dunteman's assembly programming books included a
| "chapter 0" that I always loved, and which really stuck
| with me for how creatively they taught those topics.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I mean, CPUs do a _bunch_ of work to make us believe they
| still operate just as a fast PDP-11, and I would wager
| that besides compiler experts that work on the backend
| parts of compilers, not many people have a real feel for
| modern hardware (obviously besides those that actually
| work _on_ that given hardware).
|
| So I'm not convinced that even those who think they know
| how it works know it actually.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Assembly? Sure, that has some educational value.
|
| BASIC? That's just nostalgia for poverty.
| leoc wrote:
| Not entirely. GOTO can be pretty nice! And even the lack
| of structs probably has the advantage of helping to
| prepare you for today's world where column-major is back
| in style, for performance reasons.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/OtherDocs/Has
| k... - describing why, in 2001, he thought Haskell was a
| good choice for a first college course in CS.
|
| You can read many of his thoughts here:
| https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/welcome.html
| nonameiguess wrote:
| To be fair to Dijkstra, he was writing about how he believed
| university students should be taught. Two years before that
| cruelty paper was published, I was getting my first exposure
| ever to computer programming when my parents bought a
| Commodore 64 that came with a BASIC manual that showed how to
| make a Pong clone. I was 6 years old.
|
| There's maybe an analogy to riding a bike. If you're aspiring
| to compete in a grand tour, you probably want power meters,
| lactate threshold and VO2 max tests in a lab, training that
| is principled and somewhat scientific in the way it builds
| toward a goal. If you're 6, your parents just put you on the
| seat and push you until your balance gets good enough that
| you can take the training wheels off.
| lars_francke wrote:
| Total aside: Training wheels are a thing I remember from my
| youth but today (at least here) they are barely used at all
| anymore.
|
| I'm still used to the phrase (taking the training wheels
| off) but I'm fairly certain my kids will grow up not using
| it.
| rswail wrote:
| The sort of pushbikes for littler kids lets them learn
| balance and steering before also having to learn how to
| pedal and brake.
|
| So half the learning happens on those pushbikes before
| they move to real bikes.
| crest wrote:
| Enough LISP _and_ Assembler can eventually cure the worst BASIC
| inflicted brain damage, but some scars remain.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Messing with hardware and Forth... fun times
| lgeorget wrote:
| My first ever programming language was VBA for Excel because I
| found a magazine with a tutorial on that laying around in my
| father's office, no idea why. I think the second one was the
| Basic on my Texas Instruments calculator.
| _sys49152 wrote:
| basic gang stand up
| linsomniac wrote:
| I also cut my teeth with BASIC. First was on the Apple ][s at
| school, then I got a Vic-20 at home. A lot of the cooler games
| for the Vic-20 were just a boatload of integer data you had to
| type in from magazines, not a very educational experience. Then I
| got access to an HP system with Rocky Mountain BASIC, which was a
| pretty sweet system. A few years later I got my first
| professional experience by working on the RM BASIC port to HP/UX
| as a tester. ~5 years later I came back to RMB working on a
| production test management system called Functional Test Manager,
| and I just had lunch with a guy I worked with on that a couple
| days ago.
|
| BASIC was, I'm realizing as I write this, an integral part of my
| career. RIP Thomas.
| bastloing wrote:
| So sad, he helped lots of us kids learn something that would
| later turn into a productive career.
| gip wrote:
| As a teenager I went to a science fair organized by the Communist
| party (true story and obviously it wasn't in the US). A guy there
| was explaining how computers works and he took the time to show
| me BASIC. I wrote my first program that day and found it
| fascinating. I was enthusiastic about learning more so I asked my
| Dad for a computer. Said he "Study Math, it's exactly the same".
|
| My next real contact with computers was 15 years later.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| I was 13 when DTSS was introduced, so never had an opportunity to
| learn programming with Basic. Fortunately, that didn't harm me,
| and I've managed to compensate for this disadvantage.
|
| I don't want in any way to minimize the impact of a language
| designed for non-experts. But, while Basic, and its many
| limitations, was the best that could be done with the relatively
| limited systems it was first implemented on, it doesn't scale. I
| recall, around 1970, building an interactive front end for an
| inventory system, using a commercial company's version of
| Dartmouth (or GE) Basic. It came to about 900 lines, and even I
| couldn't make sense of it.
|
| It's a mistake to believe that non-experts write 20-line mortgage
| programs, or 50-line dice games. If what you're teaching them has
| any value, they will naturally want to write programs that grow
| organically as they understand the problem better. Dartmouth
| Basic is a language in amber, best understood as what could be
| done given the equipment of the 1960s, and the understanding of
| programming development at the time. It was neither better nor
| worse than other interactive languages of the time, for example,
| JOSS (which begat PIL, DEC's FOCAL, and even the horrific MUMPS,
| closer to our time).
|
| I think that the true value of Kemeny and Kurtz's contribution
| was encouraging programming as a thing for "ordinary" people,
| rather than a priesthood. The language they invented was
| developed prior to clear understandings of structured, object-
| oriented, and functional programming, all of which have something
| to say even to non-experts. (And, yes, Microsoft continued to
| produce products with "Basic" in their names, but they have
| little to do with anything that was developed at Dartmouth.)
|
| So, kudos to all the folks who learned their programming with
| Dartmouth-style Basic. But I think there are a lot of modern
| tools that not only help non-experts write short programs, but
| scale well as their knowledge and skill grows. Smalltalk was one
| system that demonstrated that, but in more recent memory, Python
| and Racket are also good examples.
|
| By comparison with film, Georges Melies did some amazing work in
| 1900, but nobody would confuse that with the work of modern
| directors.
|
| (I don't want to get into a discussion of What Is The One True
| Introductory Language; I have my opinions on that, but they are
| not relevant here. Instead, I am trying to put the very
| significant contribution of Kemeny and Kurtz--democratizing
| computing--into what I see as a better perspective.)
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I mean, I don't disagree, but you might be surprised at the
| scale of systems that were written in BASIC, well into the
| 1990s and probably beyond that. And not the modern Microsoft
| Visual incarnation of it but the old, line-numbered, GOTO/GOSUB
| and everything-is-global classic style.
|
| For a while I worked at a financial company and all their
| internal systems were in BASIC. They had dozens if not hundreds
| of internal users, all running on dumb terminals connected to a
| couple of servers that ran those BASIC programs. This was
| online transactional systems as well as nightly batch jobs. The
| programmers were mostly not computer science people but
| ordinary, smart people who understood the business and did a
| good job with the tools they had. It wasn't all a mountain of
| spaghetti, they had put a lot of thought into their standards
| and practices and documentation and it was pretty easy to work
| on.
|
| It was used for far more than short programs and teaching.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| I am not surprised that large-scale programs were written in
| Dartmouth Basic, or that those programs satisfied the needs
| of their users. Some program libraries include programs in
| unstructured Fortran IV, which have been running
| satisfactorily for 60 years. Similarly, some very complex
| hospital systems were written in Mumps (aka M), in which, due
| to both the language and the programming style used, programs
| looked more or less like line noise.
|
| I once consulted for a company that had a product written in
| Pick Basic. This product had been sold around the world, and
| was very successful in their market. They wanted to modernize
| the product, so they went to a big DBMS vendor with a target
| business problem; the vendor said it would take several
| months to produce a sample solution. The company gave me the
| problem description. The next day I went back with a PoC
| program, 50 or so lines of C++. I emphasized that I had used
| C++ just because it was convenient (and that really any
| standard language would do), explained what parts of the
| problem were not addressed, and estimated that the entire
| program would take about a week's work to do. The client
| agreed on this, but said (a) that they needed a solution that
| was compatible with Pick Basic, and (b) their programmers
| only knew Pick Basic and wouldn't be any good at learning
| anything else. I don't know what became of the client and
| their product. (The Pick system was a combination of a
| variant of Dartmouth Basic and a DBMS.)
|
| I'm not in any way saying that Dartmouth Basic is useless. I
| am saying that creating this language was NOT the flash of
| genius Kemeny and Kurtz actually had, but that making
| computing accessible to non-experts was the actual point.
| anta40 wrote:
| BASIC (QB, and VB6) were my earliest exposures to programming. As
| a high schooler in 2001, only a very few were interested in
| learning programming (yes the geeks). Good old times.
|
| Eventually I switched to Java because of mobile apps (J2ME), and
| still make a living from it.
|
| RIP Thomas Kurtz.
| dxbydt wrote:
| 96! Lived a full life. RIP.
|
| I wrote a lot of QBASIC. 1986-90ish, old Bangalore. I was 12.
| There was no Mac or Unix or Windows in India those days. Only
| MSDOS. I had a 386 box. I would insert a 5.25" floppy, boot into
| command.com, then CD to GWBASIC.EXE and enter GWBASIC. Wrote a
| lot of GWBASIC to annoy friends and family by emitting high
| pitched sounds. You could do SOUND 2000+i, j, where i is the
| frequency & j was duration. You could even control volume from
| BASIC. I would put that in a WHILE WEND loop and make it go
| crazy. People didn't know how to turn it off once it got going.
| Then suddenly one day DOS went away and we had something called
| MS WINDOWS 3.1 and you had to insert a white round ball into a
| mouse and click on icons, no more command line, and even GWBASIC
| was gone, they put QBASIC and it came with snake program. Then I
| got into the graphics craze. We had a CGA & so I did SCREEN 2,
| then used LINE and CIRCLE to my heart's content. Few colors only.
| Then we upgraded to VGA monitor then SCREEN 12 was a full
| 640x480, I wrote QBASIC to make annoying sounds while drawing. It
| was an amazing childhood, thanks to this miracle language. BASIC
| led to something called CLIPPER, then I did some FOXPRO, got paid
| actual rupees to write an inventory control system in FOXPRO,
| then MFC, Borland C++...all the way upto today.
|
| But it all started with BASIC. Amazing language. Thank you, Dr.
| Kurtz.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Same here, owe him a lot it was also my first programming
| language (on 286's).
|
| It's interesting that you mention GWBASIC specifically because
| that was also the BASIC I had access to. It doesn't seem this
| variant was popular in the US.
|
| Also learned CLIPPER and created all sorts of tools and
| business apps. Yet another thing that seemed very localized.
| YZF wrote:
| BASIC on the Sinclair ZX-81 was how I started somewhere around
| 1982. A whopping 1KB of memory. 24 lines of 32 characters each.
| Hooked to my parent's TV with me coding on the floor.
|
| RIP
| pico303 wrote:
| I first learned to program in CBASIC on an Eagle II (Z80), then
| later TI-BASIC, and finally MSBASIC. Thank you, Mr. Kurtz, for
| introducing me to a wonderful career and fond memories of hacking
| "BASIC Computer Games" by David Ahl into my early PCs.
| peagreen wrote:
| Tom Kurtz and John Kemeny and BASIC changed my life, too. I wrote
| my first BASIC program in 1970 [0] and starting in high school
| the next year spent hours with the Model 33 Teletype in our
| school's computer room, programming in BASIC via the school
| district's HP-2000 time-sharing system. Ultimately I decided to
| go to Dartmouth because of their undergraduate computer
| philosophy. Any kind of computer access was a big deal back then,
| and being able to program really distinguished you compared to
| the rest of one's age cohort when it came to applying for grad.
| schools, jobs, etc. So I feel like I've been riding the crest of
| that early 1970s wave ever since, despite the explosion of
| skilled people in younger cohorts.
|
| It was a remarkable and fleeting time. If I were 13 years old
| now, I don't know of a comparable skill that could so
| effortlessly propel a person forward.
|
| [0] Here it is: 10 LET N=5^2.5 20
| PRINT N 30 END
|
| The answer (55 and something) was a revelation. I didn't know
| about logarithms then, so the meaning of fractional exponents was
| a complete mystery. I had to ask my math teacher to make sense of
| the answer.
| fuzztester wrote:
| Being rusty at school math, I was going to ask you how to solve
| that, then decided to google it.
|
| I typed "5 to the power of 2.5", and after a few clicks, got
| this (with 'math solver' shown in the search box:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=5%5E(2.5)
|
| There is a button to show solving steps.
|
| There is also a Quora answer that shows two different ways of
| solving it, using properties of exponents.
|
| Cool. Now I need to go brush up on my school math. :)
| rswail wrote:
| 1977 I typed my first program into an ASR33 (connected by serial
| to a PDP-11/10):
|
| 10 PRINT "HELLO"
|
| 20 END
|
| RUN
|
| I was hooked.
| rswail wrote:
| How do we get a black bar for this?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Like many BASIC was my first programming language, Timex 2068
| BASIC to be more exact.
|
| Followed by GW-BASIC and Turbo BASIC.
|
| Not only it was my entry path into the computing world as a kid,
| it also showed me how to do systems programming in a language
| kind of safe, alongside Z80 and 8086 Assembly.
|
| Turbo Pascal was the next in the learning path, after those BASIC
| variants.
|
| Many thanks to Dr. Kutz and Dr.Kemeny, and those that built upon
| their work, for setting me free into the computing world without
| being tainted C is the true and only path to systems programming.
| oliviersca wrote:
| I wrote my first line of BASIC in 1976, if I remember correctly!
| I was 15 years old, and my dad and I went to a trade fair. There
| was an IBM booth there. A man invited me to try a moon-landing
| game. It was on an IBM 5100. I asked my dad what happened to the
| characters that scrolled off the top of the screen! Since he
| wasn't at all into tech, he asked the IBM engineer to explain it
| to me. And that's when I knew it was my thing! I wrote my first
| few lines of BASIC right there! The following year, there was a
| Hewlett Packard booth where an HP-9825A (I think?) was drawing
| Lissajous figures on a plotter. I was mesmerized! The next year,
| I start working during my holidays to buy an HP-25. The year
| after that, I got a TRS-80 Model 1 Level II and started
| programming it in BASIC. I didn't know much at the time. I even
| bought the Editor/Assembler, thinking it would increase the
| screen resolution! After that, it was an Atari ST (with Megamax C
| and GFA BASIC), and then PCs with a whole variety of languages
| ...
|
| What has always impressed me is that some people managed, in just
| a few days, weeks, or months, to invent languages used by
| millions of people, sometimes for their entire lives! What an
| impact!
|
| Mr. Kurtz, you may not have created the best language, but what
| you did create brought joy and inspired a whole generation of
| young programmers. Joy that, I feel, has somewhat faded today.
| Unless you're coding in Rust!
|
| Thank you, Mr. Kurtz!
| systemBuilder wrote:
| OMG you lived my dream. In 1976 I was 14 years old and started
| programming for the first time on the PLATO SYSTEM (university
| of illinois), the first computer with plasma screens, 1000
| terminals, SOCIAL NETWORKS, MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR (it was
| called airfight was the name back then), the FIRST DUNGEON GAME
| (pedit5 / dnd). As I mowed lawns I dreamed of buying an HP-25
| or SR-52 calculator or maybe an IMSAI 8080 computer of my own
| so badly! I eventually taught PLATO how to simulate a pocket
| football game, and wrote BASIC programs using a toy interpreter
| but they didn't have a way to store programs when your session
| was finished! :-(
| cfmcdonald wrote:
| I interviewed Thomas Kurtz at his home in 2010 for my
| dissertation on the "computer utility" vision of the 60s and 70s
| (which foresaw a world of large computer utilities that would
| function like AT&T or an electrical power company, but for
| electronic services).
|
| He was long-since retired, but still living in the hills of New
| Hampshire near Dartmouth. Unfortunately I can't find my interview
| notes right now, but I do remember that he was very kind and
| welcoming. What he and John Kemeny did at Dartmouth was truly
| remarkable. For them the technology (time-sharing and BASIC) was
| a means to an end of educating and empowering students, and
| ultimately society as a whole.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| We would love to read your dissertation if you don't mind
| sharing.
|
| Edit: Thank you for sharing! Looking forward to reading it.
| cfmcdonald wrote:
| It's available on my blog website:
| https://technicshistory.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2016/11/cfm_7...
|
| I did capture there his most choice quote from the interview:
|
| > Kurtz later said that he and Kemeny saw MAC's agenda as
| totally different from Dartmouth's--MIT was trying to design
| the theoretically best computer utility, with layers of
| security "and all that kind of crap."
| cobrabyte wrote:
| I am eternally grateful to Dr. Kurtz for his work on BASIC. I'm
| sure I'm not alone in saying that BASIC was my first foray into
| programming as a young teen, and it sparked my love for
| programming. RIP
| whartung wrote:
| What's curious is how one of the reasons Pascal was derided was
| due to the limitations of the original system followed by the
| incompatibilities of the implementations that reached the market.
|
| Meanwhile, BASIC, which I think it could be argued was the
| backbone of the mini and micro computing industry for 20 years,
| was all over the map in terms of implementation and features.
|
| None of the BASICs I used were compatible outside the
| fundamentals of expressions and the core data types, and even
| then they all handled strings differently.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| It seems to me that people had different levels of expectations
| for BASIC and Pascal.
|
| BASIC was a teaching language. Yeah, people pushed it to write
| production systems, but it was still a jumped-up teaching
| language, and everybody knew it. People did serious work with
| it, but it was still a "toy" language. If you had a serious
| program written in BASIC, it wasn't expected to be portable.
|
| Pascal started as a teaching language, too, but it got taken
| more as a "serious" language. (To be fair, it did have _far_
| better control constructs than BASIC...) It got hyped as a
| "serious" language. But it wasn't able to reach the bar set by
| those expectations, for the reasons you state.
|
| Could you have written the same applications in Pascal that
| were written in BASIC? Almost certainly. Would you have been
| better off doing so? Definitely.
|
| Maybe the difference was, BASIC was more approachable - it was
| something a 10-year-old could tinker with. Pascal was more a
| thing that college kids could tinker with. So Pascal had higher
| expectations. The same kind of limitations were more a
| violation of the expectations.
| coliveira wrote:
| The difference is that BASIC was an interpreted language, which
| was considered to be necessarily non-portable and only useful
| for teaching and small scale systems. And in fact we have no
| large software written in pascal (at least the original
| version). Pascal was designed as a compiled language that could
| potentially be used to write large scale systems, but had
| serious limitations in this respect.
| mitchbob wrote:
| Is the HN black bar for Kurtz?
| Applejinx wrote:
| I assume that must be why it's there, and good for Hacker News
| to do it. 10 GOTO 10 for a great one.
| latchkey wrote:
| BASIC on an Apple IIe in the early 1980's was my first language.
|
| RIP Kurtz.
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| @dang, it would be really cool to see
| news.ycombinator.com/halloffame, or
| news.ycombinator.com/pioneers, or something like that as another
| item under news.ycombinator.com/lists for a list of these
| pioneers who get the black bar memorial. Learning more about the
| history of computers and the lesser-known pioneers who made it
| happen is always cool, though bittersweet when the black bar is
| up, of course.
| aqweflk wrote:
| Seconded. The best we can do right now is
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| nfriend wrote:
| QBasic was my first language! I recently stumbled across all my
| old QBasic programs from my childhood and resurrected them with
| DOSBox: https://origins.nathanfriend.com/
| chuckadams wrote:
| 96 RETURN
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Eloquent. Brought tears to my eyes, in fact.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| My first programming experience was with BASIC on my dad's TRS-80
| machine. (In 2011.) It's crazy to think of the impact this man
| had - a whole generation of computers put scripting tools
| straight in the user's hands when they could easily have turned
| out purchased-software-only. A lot of devs were minted from
| Kurtz's tools.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Old BASIC programmers don't die they just GOSUB and without
| RETURN
| jader201 wrote:
| I can definitely say I wouldn't be sitting where I am -- a
| software engineer, professionally for 27 years, but tinkering
| with programming for much more than that -- had I not started by
| learning BASIC on my PC Jr. (I still have fond memories of this
| cartridge [1])!
|
| It was such a fun and easy language to start out with (around 10
| years old). I had no idea at the time that it would lead me to
| where I am today. I can't imagine the number of people that have
| been influenced by him and BASIC.
|
| Thank you, Dr. Kurtz.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr#/media/File:IBM_PC_Jr...
| systemBuilder wrote:
| In high school (late 1970s) I inherited (from my deceased
| father), a white book with red/yellow titling as "The Basic
| Programming Language" (the lettering on the front appeared to be
| in IBM check-writing font). In the appendix were about 10 basic
| programs including one in particular that would produce a
| meaningless technical report of arbitray length! I read the book,
| learned basic, and typed in a few of the programs (I had access
| to the UIUC CSL Dec-20 system). What a great time to be alive!
|
| I am aware that the first STAR TREK game was written in Basic,
| using 10x10 quadrants and maybe a 10x10 quadrant universe. I
| eventually wrote an enhanced version of this called "Swords and
| Sorcery" but using a fantasy theme, not a space theme ...
|
| I was so enamored with the BASIC programming language that a
| couple of years later I wrote a miniature interpreter on the
| PLATO system, at first trying to do a primitive BASIC language,
| but later I settled on doing a forth interpreter because RPN was
| so much easier to execute ...
|
| Thank you, Dr. Kurtz. Your project helped make my youth a never
| ending joy of discovering new things! :-) :-)
| BurningFrog wrote:
| BASIC was my programming mother tongue in my Swedish high school
| in 1975!
|
| It took a while before I let go of my suspicion of languages
| without line numbers :)
|
| Maybe I would have picked up programming later some other way,
| but I'm not at all sure. So BASIC may have set me on a very
| rewarding path in life!
| jcadam wrote:
| First programming language for me was Apple Integer Basic on the
| ][e. Got me hooked on coding.
| tedd4u wrote:
| The B in BASIC stands for "beginner." AppleSoft BASIC on an Apple
| ][+ was my first programming experience -- in kindergarten
| (1979). I was 5, and with help from my brother and my dad, I was
| able to learn and program independently. When you turn a machine
| like that on, its default mode is just a blinking cursor and a
| BASIC REPL. But you could do amazing things right from BASIC with
| the ]['s colorful low-res graphics (and slightly less colorful
| hi-res graphics) using the family TV as the monitor. All the
| motivation I needed. Thank you Dr. Kurtz! (and Woz!)
| kevindamm wrote:
| The legacy of BASIC is outstanding. I learned BASIC because
| there's a BASIC ROM in the hardware of the Atari 800XL that I was
| fortunate to have access to when I was very young. The language
| was easy enough to pick up from sample programs in the back of
| its instruction manual, even for a kid who didn't know anyone who
| knew anything about computers.
|
| I never met Kurtz personally but I owe a lot to that language for
| the access to virtually limitless creativity that computers and
| computer programming have offered. My life would be very
| different if I didn't have the opportunity that the language
| provided, especially because it is both approachable and
| (somewhat) capable.
|
| Sure, it's not the best language for large scale or complex
| efforts, but it was enough for a child to be able to build text
| adventures and blit pixels to the screen (it would be another
| decade before I found out that INT was about interrupt, not
| integers). Then, as a teenager fooling around with writing games
| for the class calculators in TI-BASIC, even though that's a bit
| farther down the language family tree, that also had a positive
| impact on my growth as a developer and it was the first of many
| "same but different" experiences that you so often get in the
| realm of programming. I was also quite fortunate, that launched
| an early game dev career for me.
|
| To be honest, I wouldn't have recognized the name Thomas E. Kurtz
| before yesterday, but my mind will light up with dozens of fond
| memories at the mention of BASIC. I'm not surprised that he was
| so involved in instructional computing (but I am surprised I
| never looked into the author(s) of BASIC before, a little
| ashamed, but I'll remember his name). I actually still have the
| same Atari 800XL from my childhood and I'll think of him when I
| see it now.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| BASIC was my gateway to missing over two weeks of classes because
| I cobbled together a fishing game during my freshman year of high
| school that apparently was worthy of winning at the regional and
| state science fairs for 4 consecutive years without changes.
|
| Mission Accomplished.
|
| Thank you, Dr. Kurtz.
| edem wrote:
| Note that [Istvan
| Nemere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istv%C3%A1n_Nemere) also
| died (Hungarian novelist, wrote more than 700 books), died at 80.
| theanonymousone wrote:
| Not a good year for PL pioneers, starting with Nicklaus Wirth's
| passing.
|
| We all owe Basic a lot. No "modern" tech has filled that
| position. Rest in peace.
| gerikson wrote:
| Age comes for us all.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I originally learned to program with BASIC. When I was designing
| D, I thought back to how easy and natural string manipulation was
| in BASIC, and what a festering swamp of bugs it was in C.
|
| Having strings as easy and correct in D was a major priority, and
| history has shown that this was a success.
|
| P.S. Whenever I review C code, I first look at the string
| manipulation. The probability of finding a bug in it is near
| certainty. Question for the people who disagree - without looking
| it up, how does strncpy() deal with 0 termination?
|
| Thank you, Thomas Kurtz!
| the_af wrote:
| Wow! I've read your comments many times on HN and I never
| realized you were the creator of D.
| samatman wrote:
| I still think of Walter as the creator of Empire, who later
| went on to create D.
|
| The FM synthesis Hall of the Mountain King will be burned
| into my memories forever.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I keep thinking about training an AI to play Empire. It
| would kick ass!
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| I was thinking that same thing recently with the embedded code
| I work on. I was thinking if BASIC could handle strings on Z80
| with 4k of ROM and 16K (woo hoo!) of static RAM why do I have
| to put up with C strings on an ARM running at 48MHz?
| DamonHD wrote:
| Arrrgh! I think that I may have unintentionally insulted you in
| about 1987 when (as a callow youth) I was trying to pick a
| language for an embedded/robotics system. I believe that I
| spoke to you on the phone about ... ahem ... C, which you
| answered politely but somewhat through gritted teeth...
|
| In the end I went for C, and the OS ended up in this thing:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8ZEUwwOYxo&t=72s
|
| I still cringe about that call!
| WalterBright wrote:
| What was the call about?
|
| Don't worry about it, I don't remember it! I have come to
| regret a lot of stupid things I said when I was younger.
| DamonHD wrote:
| Well, it was a while ago... I was trying to choose a
| language to use for our start-up's tiny (2kB EPROM, 2kB
| RAM?) Z80A system, alongside some assembler, and I was
| basically having to write an OS/runtime for the robot that
| I designed the hardware for as well. I was about out of my
| depth. Candidate languages were, I think, BCPL, B, C and D,
| and I got mixed up and spoke to you about C. (It is
| possible that I spoke to the B or BCPL guy rather than
| you.) But in any case, asking one language's creator to
| extol the virtues of a different language is not clever!
| %-P Ouch!
|
| Does the name "Grey Matter" ring any bells for you?
| (Software reseller, still seems to exist...)
| WalterBright wrote:
| 1987 predates D by about 15 years!
|
| No, I don't recall the name. It was a long time ago.
| Sorry.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Back in the 80s, a coworker (knowing I was in the C
| compiler business) came to me and asked "my husband wants
| to get into C programming, which compiler should he use?"
| (At the time, there were about 30 C compilers available
| for DOS.) I replied, Datalight C!
|
| She laughed, touched my elbow, and said "oh no, not
| _your_ compiler! "
|
| Another coworker (Eric Engstrom, yes, that guy!) heard
| this and let out huge belly laugh. She suddenly realized
| what she had said, and got very embarrassed. (I won't
| print her name. I've long since forgiven her! I just
| thought it was funny.)
|
| Good ole' Eric. Truly larger than life. I miss him.
| leettools wrote:
| It seems that it is all fond memories for people whose first
| program was written in BASIC ... I am one of them.
|
| Thank you, Thomas Kurtz, for starting us on a life-changing
| adventure.
| strictnein wrote:
| I'm in the same camp. I was 5 or 6 when I was reading books
| full of code and typing them into our C64. And writing
| wonderful programs like: 10 PRINT "My sister
| is dumb" 20 PRINT "I am cool!!" 30 GOTO 10
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I guess I owe a lot to Mr Kurtz too.
|
| The first time I signed into a dial-up BBS, it asked me to make
| up a handle. My GWBasic manual was sitting in front of me. I
| still use that name to this day.
| Jun8 wrote:
| "DTSS was unveiled on May 1, 1964, along with BASIC. By that
| fall, hundreds of students were exploring BASIC on the 20
| terminals around campus."
|
| How far have we come! I just looked up and Dartmouth had about
| 3000 students at that time, so one time sharing terminal per 150
| students!
| chadd wrote:
| C64 BASIC got me started in my career. So grateful!
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| My first exposure to computers was at the age of 9, summer of
| 1982, my parents signed me up for computer camp and we learned
| BASIC on a TRS-80 with a cassette drive
|
| 10 PRINT "Joe is cool"
|
| 20 GOTO 10
|
| ENTER
|
| <Raises hand> "Help me!"
| wslh wrote:
| RIP. An interview [0].
|
| I started learning Logo as a kid on a TI-99/4A, and I was
| fortunate to have a personal teacher who introduced me to BASIC
| on an Apple II/e-compatible computer (Franklin ACE 1000). This
| early exposure allowed me to explore programming in all
| directions and share my knowledge by teaching and helping friends
| on various platforms like Commodores (including the Amiga),
| Sinclairs, Texas Instruments, MSX, BBC, and more. BASIC truly was
| everywhere.
|
| BASIC also served as a bridge to Assembly language [1], with
| powerful features like PEEK, POKE, CALL, and SYS. It's remarkable
| that Visual Basic later became such a success, ultimately passing
| its legacy to .NET in more recent times. There was also a trend
| of microcontrollers supporting BASIC around the 2000s.
|
| On a personal note, I was amazed as a kid when I discovered the
| power of MID$ and used it to write my own programming language.
| That experience felt like pure magic.
|
| [0]
| https://www.dartmouth.edu/library/rauner/archives/oral_histo...
|
| [1] http://swain.webframe.org/tshirts/peek_and_poke_zoom.jpg
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