Thomas E. Kurtz has died

Could we get a black bar for Dr. Kurtz, please?

The legacy of BASIC on our industry can hardly be understated. The language and its mission at Dartmouth was innovative.

BASIC had immeasurable secondary effects simply by being the first programming language so many new computer users were exposed to (particularly near the dawn of personal computers).

Edit: I got sucked into some nostalgia.

Here's the 1964 edition of the Dartmouth BASIC reference: http://web.archive.org/web/20120716185629/http://www.bitsave...

It's really charming, and I think it gives you a bit of the feel for the time.

(I also particularly like, on page 21, the statement "TYPING IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR THINKING".)

That manual is a great find! Dr. Kurtz was surely way ahead of his time in aiming to bring computing to the masses, well before the microcomputer revolution. BASIC was an easy onramp to programming that hooked a ton of people on computing, especially kids of the 70s/80s like me. He shaped the future as much as anyone.

The funny thing is that I went undergrad to some big name tech school in the late 70s and you barely had access to computers without a specific need or for specific coursework. (I took FORTRAN using punch cards and a mainframe.) At Dartmouth for grad school, access to computing resources was much more democratized, even though I was working in material science.

The reason for that is simple. money.

In my first year FORTRAN or cards as you say then the University department bought a mini and used BASIC.

About the next year the joint computer facility (i.e. non-EE/CS) got a VAX but I never had a particular reason to get an account.

Looking back, the EECS department was actually a pretty active center for computer-related research. But computers weren't widely-used elsewhere at the time.

The legacy was huge for me. As a kid I would type BASIC into our TI “computer” that hooked up to our only TV. I was labeling cables hoping no one would cut the power. We had no disc drive to save what I typed.

Then years later as a college freshman during the dot com boom I got my first job writing VB. Literally changed my life and put me on a path where I was able to be better off than my parents.

In the manual they have the symbols for zero (0) and the letter O switched.

This leads to the statement : F0R X=1 T0 1OO.

Was it really that way back(wards) in 1964?

I suppose it took a day, but there was nothing spookier than replying on a different thread only to update with a black bar and me frantically trying to figure out what happened over the course of a few minutes of my typing.

It's most likely legacy from pre-computer unit record equipment. These machines could only handle numbers and printed zeros without a slash because there was nothing to confuse them with. When letters were later added, it was the new character that got the slash.

Additional citation hunting from 2020 when the BASIC manual was shared & discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25462835

> The legacy of BASIC on our industry can hardly be understated.

The expression you're looking for is “the legacy of BASIC on our industry can hardly be overstated.” You're trying to say its legacy is huge; whatever anyone says, it won't be an overstatement. If it “couldn't be understated”, however insignificant one said it is, that would still be true. That wasn't what you meant, was it?

(And yes, that means user emptiestplace’s comment didn't deserve to be downvoted into oblivion.)