Thomas E. Kurtz with an early computer at Dartmouth in the early 1960s. He worked to make computers more accessible to all students, not just those in technical fields — a novel idea at the time.

Thomas E. Kurtz, who translated the exhilarating power of computer science in the 1960s as the coinventor of BASIC, a programming language that replaced inscrutable numbers and glyphs with ...

Although computer programming has evolved in the years since Dr. Kurtz and Kemeny introduced their language, BASIC is “still very much alive” today, said Dag Spicer, senior curator at the ...

Thomas E. Kurtz, a Dartmouth College professor who co-created the novice-friendly computer code known as Basic during the 1960s and helped make it the industry standard for programmers during the ...