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Thomas Eugene Kurtz, the co-founder of the BASIC programming language celebrates his birthday today. Kurtz once commented that if FORTRAN was the lingua franca (common language) of the computer world, BASIC was the "lingua playpen."
Together with John G. Kemeny, with whom he collaborated on many projects, Thomas E Kurtz designed and developed the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS) and the computer programming language, Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, or BASIC.
Thomas E Kurtz, born February 22, 1928
There were many implementations of BASIC, the most widely used being Microsoft's MSBASIC and later QBASIC, and True BASIC, Kurtz and Kemeny's original basic, is one of the few still being developed commercially. It is available from true.basic.com
For more on how BASIC came about see:
Kemeny & Kurtz, inventors of BASIC
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