It is partly thanks to Basic, the computer language he co-created, that computers stopped being those mysterious, even downright repulsive, machines. Thomas E. Kurtz, an important figure in the democratization of computing, died on Tuesday, November 12, in Lebanon, United States. He was 96 years old.
Born in 1928 in the state of Illinois, he obtained his first university degree there in 1950, then completed a master’s degree and a doctorate in mathematics at the prestigious Princeton University. It was at the University of California, in 1951, where he first came into contact with a computer, a machine that, at that time, was the size of a Norman wardrobe and cost more than a house. In 1956, mathematician John Kemeny, temporary assistant to Albert Einstein, recruited him as a professor at the venerable Dartmouth University (New Hampshire), located 200 kilometers from Boston. Kurtz and Kemeny share the same radical idea: every student should be able to use a computer, regardless of their scientific level, regardless of their discipline. “An idea” completely crazy » judged Thomas E. Kurtz in a 2014 interview at his university. A conviction that they tried to put into practice in the early sixties.
Kurtz and Kemeny envision a place where students will be able to access a machine without having to reserve it, as used to happen, several days in advance. In a presentation brochure dating from 1966, John Kemeny compares this place to libraries where “Any student can come in and explore the books. [sans] without permission ». In this computer center no one will ask you “whether they are working on a serious research problem or doing homework like a dilettante, playing a game of soccer, writing a letter to their girlfriend,” writes John Kemeny, who died in 1992.
To achieve their vision, Kurtz and Kemeny are working on a two-part project. The first consists of connecting dozens of computing stations to a single central computer, in order to share calculation time. The second: create a new ultra-simplified computer language that allows you to write a small program after a few hours of training. Aided by their students, the two academics imagined the Darsimco language and then Dope, which were quickly abandoned. The third attempt will be the good one: the Basic is born, therefore “Multi-purpose symbolic instruction code for beginners”EITHER “Multipurpose Symbolic Instruction Code for Beginners”.
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