Thomas Eugene Kurtz

Thomas Eugene Kurtz was born in Oak Park, Illinois. He earned his bachelor's degree from Knox College and completed a PhD in mathematics at Princeton University in 1956 under statistician John Tukey. That same year, mathematician John Kemeny recruited Kurtz to join the mathematics faculty at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

Kurtz and Kemeny shared a revolutionary conviction: computing should not be the exclusive preserve of research scientists and punched-card operators, but an accessible tool for all college students. In 1964, they designed the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS) and co-invented BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). At 4:00 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of Dartmouth's College Hall, they successfully ran the first BASIC program. Kurtz and Kemeny made BASIC freely available in the public domain, enabling it to become the universal language that powered the microcomputer revolution on the Altair, Apple II, Commodore, and IBM PC. Kurtz later co-founded True BASIC Inc. and received the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award in 1991.