Along with John Kemeny, Thomas E. Kurtz co-invented the #BASIC #programming language.

You have them to thank for almost every future software #developer that grew up in the #1970s and #1980s, and therefore almost every digital product you're using today.

We lost a giant last week.

10 PRINT "RIP"
2024 END

https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-memoriam-thomas-e-kurtz-1928-2024/

@mjgardner In high school, we had no teachers with qualifications to teach computers, but we had a teletype with a direct line to Dartmouth. I taught myself BASIC and went on to a career in software engineering, thanks in part to Thomas Kurtz.

We had a teacher who learned BASIC in the military, but nobody had computers. The school district office had one, so we wrote our programs on graph paper, and the teacher took them over to the district office after hours and ran them and printed the results.