Folks here likely saw this, but I didn't see it come through (apologies if I missed it). Thomas Kurtz, who developed BASIC and the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS) with John Kemeny, passed away last week, at 96. 

NY Times obit:  “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 obit: "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." [he was modest, and deeply admired Kemeny!]

Computer History Museum obit: "DTSS was the earliest successful, large-scale timesharing system, a remarkable achievement. [...] DTSS was unveiled on May 1, 1964, along with BASIC. By that fall, hundreds of students were exploring BASIC on the 20 terminals around campus."

People on HackerNews are paying their respects by mentioning the influence of BASIC on their lives and careers.

I interviewed him in 2017. He was so generous, and as brilliant as you'd expect. He wrote me a memo on "Grammatical Simplifications in BASIC." He loved memos--was an academic mathematician at heart, even at 89! I wrote about the interview here: https://annettevee.substack.com/p/thomas-kurtz-basic-and-computing and also in 2023, in a critical code studies article, "BASIC FTBALL and Computer Programming for All” 

Other great work on BASIC that many here already know:

The Birth of BASIC documentary: from the 50th anniversary of BASIC, in 2014. 

Rankin, J. (2018) A People's History of Computing in the United States. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Montfort, N. et al. (2014) 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1));: GOTO 10, Cambridge: MIT Press.

Annette