Thomas eugene kurtz biography of albert
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In 1994, he was inducted as a Fellow of the ACM.
Who is Thomas E. Kurtz?
Thomas E. Kurtz was a Dartmouthprofessor of mathematics and a computer scientist, who along with his colleague John G. Kemeny set in motion the then revolutionaryconcept of makingcomputers as freelyavailable to collegestudents as librarybooks were, by implementing the concept of Time-Sharing at Dartmouth College.
In 1951, Kurtz was fortunate in obtaining rare experience on a computer—the pioneering SWAC created by the National Bureau of Standards and housed at UCLA. He helped form American National Standards committee X3J2, which developed the ANSI standard for BASIC, serving as chair from 1974 to 1985. In 1979, he and Stephen J. Garland organized a professional master's program in Computer and Information Systems, funded in part with a grant from IBM.
In 1983, Kurtz joined Kemeny and three former Dartmouth students in forming True BASIC, Inc., whose purpose was to develop quality educational software and a platform-independent BASIC compiler. degree from PrincetonUniversity in 1956, where his advisor was John Tukey, and joined the MathematicsDepartment of DartmouthCollege that same year, where he taughtstatistics and numerical analysis.
In 1983, Kurtz and Kemeny co-founded a companycalled True BASIC, Inc.
to market True BASIC, an updatedversion of the language.
Kurtz has also served as CouncilChairman and Trustee of EDUCOM, as well as Trustee and Chairman of NERComP, and on the PiercePanel of the President's ScientificAdvisory Committee.
- Born
- Feb 22, 1928
Oak Park - Also known as
- Nationality
- Profession
- Education
- Princeton University
- Knox College
- Employment
Edit
Submitted
on July 23, 2013
Thomas E.
Kurtz
- Birthdate
- 1928/02/22
- Birthplace
- Oak Park, IL
- Death date
- 2024/11/12
Biography
Thomas Eugene Kurtz was born on February 22nd, 1928, in Oak Park, Illinois, USA. Kurtz earned his Bachelors degree from Knox College in 1950 and his masters and Ph.D.
Upon termination of the CIS program in 1988, Kurtz returned to teaching and retired from Dartmouth in 1993.
Kurtz served as council chairman and trustee of EDUCOM and on the so-called Pierce Panel of the President's Advisory Committee. He also served on the steering committee for two NSF- and ARPA-supported activities and was the chair of the first CCUC conference on instructional computing.
Today, BASIC still runs on many platforms, including the credit-card sized Raspberry Pi.
From 1966 to 1975, Kurtz served as the director of the Kiewit Computation Center at Dartmouth and as director of the Office of Academic Computing from 1975 to 1978. In the early days of academic computing in the 1960s, there were no simple non-professional programming languages available for undergraduates.
In his mission to allow non-expert users to interact with the computer, he co-developed the BASICprogramminglanguageduring 1963 to 1964.
A native of Oak Park Illinois, United States, Kurtzgraduated from Knox College in 1950, and was awarded a Ph.D. DTSS was unveiled on May 1, 1964, along with BASIC. From 1966 to 1975, he was the director of the Kiewit Computation Center at Dartmouth, and in 1979, Kurtz co-founded a professional master’s program in computer and information systems
Kurtz died on November 12th, 2024.
To realize their vision, Kurtz and Kemeny concurrently developed the Dartmouth Timesharing System, allowing BASIC to be accessed by students around campus using Teletype terminals.
Born in Oak Park Illinois in 1928, Kurtz graduated from Knox College in 1950, and received his PhD in mathematics from Princeton University in 1956.
Thomas E.
Kurtz
For the co-invention of the BASIC programming language, which brought the power of computers to beginners around the world, and the Dartmouth Timesharing System
If Fortran is the lingua franca, then certainly it must be true that BASIC is the lingua playpen.
— Thomas E.
Kurtz
Thomas Eugene Kurtz is an American mathematician, computer scientist and co-inventor, with John Kemeny, of the BASIC programming language and Dartmouth Timesharing System. General Electric, which had donated computers to Dartmouth, extended DTSS into the kernel of their online services, such as Genie. Princeton in 1956. DTSS was the earliest successful, large-scale timesharing system, a remarkable achievement.
BASIC was aimed at this audience. After receiving his doctorate, Kurtz joined the faculty at Dartmouth University, where he remained for the entirety of his career. In 1978, Harvard students Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote their first version of BASIC for a new hobbyist-oriented microcomputer, the MITS Altair 8800.
SWAC, the Standards Western Automatic Computer, was among the earliest electronic computers in the United States and was supervised by legendary computer pioneer and 2013 CHM Fellow Harry Huskey.
Kurtz began teaching at Dartmouth upon receiving his PhD. After a few years of teaching, he and Kemeny developed the original version of the Dartmouth Timesharing System (DTSS), a method of sharing computer access across a network and a requirement for allowing multiple students access to BASIC.
In 1964, with John G. Kemeny, the chair of Dartmouth's math department, Kurtz developed the BASIC programming language, an IEEE Milestone, which was widely used by beginner programmers until the the 1990s.