His invention of the Basic programming language paved the way for the personal computer revolution
At the start of the 1960s, when most computers occupied an entire room, the world’s programmers could barely fill a baseball stadium. Only a few thousand specialists could wrangle arcane coding languages such as Fortran and Cobol, and the unwieldy mainframes they ran on. By the mid-1970s, there were millions of programmers.
MIT was already using the concept of time sharing for research: instead of “batch processing” each job in full, time-sharing systems ran multiple jobs for one second at a time. Kurtz’s insight was to tap this for educational purposes, which he said was a “completely nutty idea” at the time. Dartmouth’s first computer wasn’t capable of running a time-sharing system but Kurtz and Kemeny started hand-coding one, recruiting undergraduates to help.
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