Thomas Kurtz, BASIC, and computing for everyone
On interviewing Tom in 2017 and my article on “BASIC FTBALL and Computer Programming for All”
The first thing that Thomas Kurtz asked me was: why is an English professor interested in talking to me?
Fair point. I told him I was interested in the computer as a reading and writing instrument and that it was difficult to separate out the different kinds of composing we did with it. He agreed. And then I quoted my favorite line of his back to him: “I find quite compelling about you: you’ve said ‘there are more people in the world than programmers,’ so we should have languages that are appropriate for all of those people.”
“Well, you came to the right place,” he said.
Thomas Kurtz died last week at 96. The New York Times wrote, “At Dartmouth, long before the days of laptops and smartphones, he worked to give more students access to computers. That work helped propel generations into a new world.” Dartmouth describes his visionary work and lifelong connection to the college. Droves of programmers came to Hacker News to pay their respects by tracing their careers back to BASIC:
“it all started with BASIC. Amazing language. Thank you, Dr. Kurtz.”
“BASIC was the language in all the magazines that responded to people who wanted to try ideas in their new microcomputers […] We'd think 'hey, I want to try this' and either succeeding or looking for more powerful BASICs [...] leading to peeks, pokes, even assembler. A blast, and that feeling of empowerment! Thank you, Thomas Kurtz!”
“I owe a lot to that language for the access to virtually limitless creativity that computers and computer programming have offered.”
They describe writing a moon landing game in BASIC in 1976, inspiration to design a new programming language, and cutting teeth on BASIC in Sweden or India. I learned BASIC on my Commodore 64 in the 1980s, too. BASIC was everywhere in the 1970s and 80s.
I met Thomas Kurtz in October of 2017, when I traveled to Dartmouth to research the development of the BASIC programming language as the first successful computational literacy project. I was 8 months pregnant with my third child. Thomas Kurtz, who had developed BASIC with John Kemeny in the 1960s, was 89 years old. I had questions about BASIC that I thought only Kemeny or Kurtz could answer. Kemeny died in 1992. (He was a lifelong smoker, Kurtz lamented.) I felt the clock ticking.
For several years, I’d been working on a side project about Dartmouth College in the 1960s. In the summer of 1966, 50 English teachers came together on campus to discuss what English was and how to teach it. This “Dartmouth Seminar,” as it’s now called, launched a research trajectory for my field of Rhetoric and Composition. Over in the math department, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz had been developing programming languages that would be accessible to non-specialists, including English majors at Dartmouth. It seemed too coincidental to me: two literacy projects a stone’s throw from each other, at the birth of both computer science and composition as research fields? They must have known each other!
They did not. RIP my brilliant article on “computation and composition at Dartmouth in the 1960s” that would have justified my entire career.
But the archives couldn’t tell me for certain that these projects were unrelated. I didn’t really know until I talked to the people who were there—representatives from both the English project and the BASIC project. There weren’t many of them left. I never wrote that article that tied it all together, but I did learn a lot about the history of composition and computing. (If you’re curious about what came out of my research on the English side, check out the Dartmouth ’66 exhibit on WAC Clearinghouse).
What I learned from Thomas Kurtz was that BASIC was always a literacy project: “very early on we used that term computer literacy,” he said. The science majors at Dartmouth already knew about computers and their applications. But Kemeny and Kurtz wanted to reach the other 75% of undergraduates to help prepare them for a world where computers were increasingly important. They wrote in Science in 1968:
knowledge about computers and computing must become an essential part of liberal education. Science and engineering students obviously need to know about computing in order to carry on their work. But we felt exposure to computing and its practice, its powers and limitations must also be extended to nonscience students, many of whom will later be in decision-making roles in business, industry and government.
To do that, they needed a language simple enough to be learned quickly, by non-experts. Kurtz wrote me a memo describing some of the key decisions for simplifying BASIC, including choices to simplify number types, compile, and include end statements. Kurtz explained in an internal memo from 1963: “In all cases where there is a choice between simplicity and efficiency, simplicity is chosen.”
He had written about these choices elsewhere (e.g., in Wexelblat), but I was tickled to receive a personal memo on grammatical simplifications in BASIC. (Kurtz loved memos!) I think he figured an English teacher would appreciate the grammatical angle—and he was right.
Kurtz described to me several undergraduate projects from the early days of BASIC, including a concordance for Wallace Stevens poems. Computers were at a handful of colleges in those days, but rarely available to undergraduates and even more rarely available for uses in the humanities. But Dartmouth had few graduate students and their undergraduates were brilliant.
That’s another thing I learned from Kurtz: he and Kemeny loved their students. Kurtz spoke about Dartmouth undergraduates with awe and excitement:
We were able to hire students to work during the summer, to have summer jobs working on the LGP-30. And they showed up and did grand stuff! They did stuff that in my estimation is higher quality than what I had seen by traveling around the LGP-30 users group around the country.
Kemeny and I […] we were the leaders of the band, we weren’t the performers, and these kids […] they were brilliant. They did work comparable … no question comparable to the work that was being done by professional programmers.
Kemeny and Kurtz were unique in their support of undergraduate computing. They made sure that computing was free. They let students write programs not just for courses or utility, but for fun—even games! Students helped to develop BASIC and the accompanying Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS). Kemeny and Kurtz credited undergraduates with the bulk of the work for DTSS.
Dartmouth in the 1960s was as elite as it is now, and only open to men. But Kemeny and Kurtz shared BASIC freely and, through DTSS, made computing available to high schools on their local network. From there, it spread through university networks, then local computer conventions, math education programs, books on games, and computing magazines. Though famously derided as a professional language, BASIC was the lingua franca of computing through the 1980s. It was Kurtz’s idea to make computing accessible to all.
I wrote about the legacy of BASIC in my book Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming is Changing Writing (MIT Press 2017), which I had meant to gift to Kurtz, but left at my AirBnB the day I met him (oops). I cite my interview with Kurtz in my deep dive into the BASIC program Dartmouth Championship Football (1965), “BASIC FTBALL and Computer Programming for All” (2023). A brief excerpt here:
While they generally described their pedagogical motivations along the lines of civic engagement, as above, Kurtz also told me they were invested in the creative potential of the computer. There were others who argued earlier for computer literacy — George Forsythe in 1959 and Alan Perlis in 1961 — but Kemeny and Kurtz were the first to develop a working system to support it [Kurtz 2017b]. Given the hardware and programming languages of the time, it wasn’t clear to anyone how widespread computer education could actually work. The LOGO programming language — which emphasized graphics and was designed for younger children — was developed very soon after BASIC. Kemeny and Kurtz admired Seymour Papert and the LOGO development team for their focus on abstract thinking and creativity, though Kurtz pointed out that LOGO stumbled a bit because it seemed to need an expert overseeing the learning process [Kurtz 2017b]. In contrast, BASIC was designed to be learned with very little support — just a couple of lectures or a manual. While both BASIC and LOGO circulated widely with microcomputers in the 1980s, LOGO tended to thrive in formal educational contexts and BASIC in informal, home, and hobbyist contexts, including the circulation of games like FTBALL.
I shared the article with Tom, his wife Aggie, and Emily Isaacs—his niece who put us in touch—and Aggie wrote: “Tom had a good time reading it. He approved of it, that is, it seemed correct.” High praise from a mathematician! I was overjoyed. I had wanted to get this history right. Emily mentioned that a few weeks prior, she and Tom had enjoyed playing with ChatGPT on her phone(!!)—“another breakthrough?” she wondered.
I’ll share a short excerpt from the interview. Here, you can see how Kurtz admired and respected Kemeny as a lifelong collaborator and friend—as well as their playful relationship:
Computers were coming into the world, but they weren’t very common. They weren’t available to the hoi polloi. However, Kemeny and I both had computer experience prior to coming to Dartmouth. […] I bragged to Kemeny that I wrote my first computer program in 1951. I was a graduate student at Princeton and spent the summer at UCLA and they had one of those homemade jots, it was called a SWAC, a Standards Western Automatic Computer. It was homemade and without going into details, it’s long before transistors were even invented— it was a vacuum tube machine and blah blah blah. So, I spent a summer out there and I won’t go into the history of that but I bragged about it. And Kemeny said ‘well, I built my first computer program 1946!’ So, he had been out at the RAND Corporation and they had a makeshift homemade computer at the RAND corporation in the very early days.
Thank you, Dr. Tom Kurtz, for your time in 2017 and for your legacy in computing.
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For more on BASIC:
Birth of BASIC [Documentary] (2014) Created by Mike Murray and Dan Rockmore. Dartmouth College. Available at:
Kemeny, J. and Kurtz, T. (1967) The Dartmouth Time-Sharing Computing System Final Report, NSF Grant GE-3864, June, Course Content Improvement Program, Dartmouth College, Dartmouth, NH.
Kemeny, J. and Kurtz, T. (1968) “Dartmouth Time-Sharing”, Science, pp. 223–228.
Kurtz, T. (1981) “BASIC Session”, in R. Wexelblat (ed.), History of Programming Languages, ACM Monograph Series. New York: Academic Press, pp. 515–549.
Montfort, N. et al. (2014) 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1));: GOTO 10, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Rankin, J. (2018) A People's History of Computing in the United States. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
What a wonderful tribute!!!