Remembering Computing Legend Thomas Kurtz

Thomas Kurtz, a professor emeritus of computer science and mathematics who played a key role in the computing revolution, died on Nov. 12 at the Jack Byrne Center for Palliative and Hospice Care in Lebanon, N.H. He was 96.

A legend in the computer world and at Dartmouth, Kurtz co-developed the BASIC programming language and the first general-purpose computer time-sharing system with John Kemeny, then chair of the mathematics department who later served as Dartmouth's 13th president.

"Tom's groundbreaking work—and enlisting of undergraduates to execute his and John Kemeny's vision—played a major role in making computers accessible to the general public, and proved that students, not specialized engineers, could drive this new movement," says Elizabeth F. Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

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Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny

Born in 1928 in Oak Park, Ill., Kurtz graduated from Knox College in 1950 and received his PhD in mathematics in 1956 at Princeton, with a focus on statistics. In 1951, Kurtz visited UCLA to work on one of the earliest electronic computers in the U.S., the Standards Western Automatic Computer. It was at this time when he wrote his first computer program. 

"I used to tell people that and Kemeny used to respond, 'Well, I wrote my first program in 1946,'" Kurtz recalled in an oral history interview recorded at Dartmouth in 2020. "Neither John nor I were computer scientists. We were mathematicians."

Kemeny hired Kurtz to join the Department of Mathematics in 1956, where he taught statistics and numerical analysis for nearly four decades. Soon after Kurtz arrived on campus, Kemeny recruited him to run Dartmouth computer programs on a new computer at MIT, since Dartmouth didn't have one.

"It involved taking punch cards and putting them into a steel box and getting the 6:20 a.m. train out of White River Junction," Kurtz recalled. "At MIT I would put the punch cards into the input hopper in the computer center and hang around for two or three hours until the printout came out, and then take all that junk back to Dartmouth."

Unbeknown to Kurtz at the time, these first trips to MIT coincided with fellow math professor John McCarthy's first convening of several famous forerunners of artificial intelligence, including a 1956 conference at Dartmouth credited with coining the term artificial intelligence.

A champion for Dartmouth undergraduates

About five years later, Kemeny arranged for Dartmouth to get its first computer, an LGP-30, and Kurtz took the lead in teaching students how to create programs using paper tape as the input device. "I gave open, announced lectures on how to do this in lab sessions," Kurtz recalled. "It was on the top floor of Bradley and we had two typewriters that could work with paper tape. They were called 'flexowriters.'"

Kurtz noticed immediately how quickly and creatively students engaged with the new machine. One student typed up the entire works of Wallace Stevens on the punch paper tape and produced a concordance to the work.

He also fondly recalled the abundant yellow teletype paper. "The yellow paper appeared all over campus. I remember at the engineering school, a faculty member said, 'The students keep turning in their homework with this yellow paper. Something is going on here.'"

Kurtz realized that Dartmouth undergraduates were particularly suited to working with new programming languages. "The work that these students did was superior—intellectually and technically—to what the computing profession at the time was doing, mostly in industry," he said.

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John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz discuss a BASIC program printout with a student.

Soon after McCarthy left for MIT, he suggested to Kurtz that Dartmouth implement the concept of time-sharing, a method of sharing computer access across a network. Kurtz relayed the idea to Kemeny, adding his own proposal to enlist undergraduates as co-creators.

"Dartmouth had the largest open-stack library in the world at that time in a college of this type, and the concept of open-stack computing, that was my idea," Kurtz said. "Thatʼs one of the few ideas I had that Kemeny didnʼt have."

In 1963, Kemeny applied for a National Science Foundation grant to bring a GE-225 computer to Dartmouth and build the first general-purpose time-sharing system. He received the funding, despite the grant reviewers' doubts about his plan to accomplish the work with undergraduates.

In a Dartmouth video, Kurtz elaborates on the novelty of their proposed approach. "The target (in computing) was research, whereas here at Dartmouth we had the crazy idea that our undergraduate students who are not going to be technically employed later on should learn how to use the computer. Completely nutty idea."

Kemeny and Kurtz realized that if they wanted to reach everyone on campus with their time-sharing vision, they needed to simplify the user interface. The popular programming languages at the time, FORTRAN and ALGOL, were "just too complicated," Kurtz recalled. "They were full of punctuation rules, the need for which was not completely obvious and therefore people werenʼt going to remember."

Kemeny proposed that all statements in the new programming language start with an English word. The two co-developed the Dartmouth Simplified Code followed by the Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment, both of which informed the development of BASIC, the Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

"In the very early days, if you did something, the computer would just look back at you. BASIC was interactive. You knew right away," Charles Palmer, a senior lecturer in the computer science department, told the New York Times in its obituary of Kurtz. "It was a turning point."

Within weeks of receiving the NSF funds, a group of undergraduate students, with Michael Busch '66 and John McGeachie '65, Tuck '75,  at the helm, "were down there all hours of the night, banging away at this stuff trying to get this stuff to work the way they wanted it to, re-writing, debugging and all that kind of stuff," Kurtz recalled.

According to Dartmouth legend, it was at 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall, when student programmers simultaneously typed "RUN" on neighboring terminals and got back correct answers to their simple programs, marking the launch of both time-sharing and BASIC. By that fall, hundreds of students were using BASIC on 20 terminals around campus. Faculty across disciplines were soon supplied with teletypes and also began creating programs of their own.

A lasting legacy

It didn't take long for BASIC to take off beyond campus. As part of the agreement to buy the GE 225 computer, Kemeny, Kurtz, and others had built a time-sharing operating system for General Electric. Running BASIC on this operating system allowed institutions and individuals across the country to dial into mainframe computers and write programs.

"I once estimated that even before Bill Gates got into the action at all, five million people in the world knew how to write programs in BASIC," Kurtz recalled. "There was something like 80 time-sharing systems in the U.S. that offered BASIC as one of their languages. And it was all over the world. I even got a letter from somebody in Siberia."

In 1978, Gates and fellow Microsoft founder Paul Allen wrote their first version of BASIC for a new personal microcomputer, the MITS Altair 8800. BASIC's popularity soared during the personal computer era, and still runs on many platforms today.

Back at Dartmouth, Kemeny and Kurtz developed a computer science concentration in the math department, with Kurtz teaching Introduction to Programming, Pascal, and Machine Learning. He also continued to teach Numerical Analysis, which had become a required course for engineering students.

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Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth in 2004

From 1966 to 1975, Kurtz served as the director of the Kiewit Computation Center at Dartmouth and, from 1975 to 1978, as director of the Office of Academic Computing. In 1983, Kurtz joined Kemeny and three former Dartmouth students in forming True BASIC, Inc., with a mission to develop quality educational software and a platform-independent BASIC compiler.

In 1979, Kurtz and Stephen Garland '63 organized a professional master's program at Dartmouth in Computer and Information Systems, which was funded in part with a grant from IBM. The first of its kind, the program developed information systems leaders for industry. When the program concluded in 1988, Kurtz returned to teaching undergraduates before retiring from Dartmouth in 1993.

Among his numerous professional activities, Kurtz served as council chairman and trustee of EDUCOM and on the 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. He helped form American National Standards committee X3J2, which developed the ANSI standard for BASIC, serving as chair from 1974 to 1985. In 1994, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Kurtz received many major awards for his work in computing, including the Computer Society's Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Pioneer Award. His work on BASIC was also recognized by IEEE as part of their milestone program which marks historic places for human innovation from around the world, adding Dartmouth to a list that includes Thomas Edison's lab in Menlo Park, N.J., where he invented the light bulb and phonograph. The plaque was placed on Feb. 22, 2021.

In his free time, Kurtz loved to experience the natural beauty of the Upper Valley. It was during a hike of Mount Monadnock with fellow math and computer science professor Don Kreider and his family when Kurtz met his wife, Aggie, who had recently been hired to lead Dartmouth's women's athletics program. "We were two pioneers," she says. They married the following year and recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.

When computers first became available to faculty and staff back in the 1970s, thanks in large part to Kurtz's efforts, there was deliberation about where to put one for athletics staff. "I said, 'put it in my office!'" Aggie Kurtz recalls with a laugh. "None of the others knew how to use it."

Kurtz was also a dedicated duplicate bridge player. Scot Drysdale, professor emeritus of computer science, recalls playing against him at tournaments. Kurtz founded a bridge club and gave lessons for many years.

Kurtz enjoyed staying in touch with his Dartmouth students and fondly recalled his teaching days. Aggie Kurtz remembers him relaying a favorite success story about math major Philip Koch '70, who went on to work for Apple. According to Kurtz, Koch failed his course the first time, in part because he missed class to go hiking. Koch repeated the class and earned a citation for his outstanding work, and then he taught the course the following year.

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(Photo courtesy of Aggie Kurtz)

Although Kurtz took great pride in his role in making computers more accessible, his passion for technology over the years didn't extend to cell phones, which he never used. "He still did sudoku and crossword puzzles," Aggie recalls.

Reflecting on the story of Dartmouth time-sharing and BASIC, Kurtz recalled with pride how it was all accomplished by undergraduate students. "Nowhere else do I know of in the history of computing has something like this been done," he said in the Dartmouth video on the birth of BASIC.

And, "it was done at Dartmouth."

In addition to his wife, Kurtz is survived by his brother David Allen Kurtz, of State College, Penn.; and his three children, nine grandchildren, and 17 great grandchildren.

Donations in Kurtz's memory can be made to the Aggie & Tom Kurtz Scholarship Fund. Gifts can be sent to: Dartmouth College, Gift Recording Office, 6066 Development Office, Hanover, NH 03755. (Note on check gift for the Aggie & Tom Kurtz Scholarship Fund in memory of Professor Tom Kurtz. For credit card gifts, please make a gift online or call 603-646-0098.)

The Dartmouth flag will be lowered in Kurtz's honor on Wednesday, Nov. 20, and Thursday, Nov. 21.