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Thomas E. Kurtz has died

(computerhistory.org)
614 points 1986 | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.782s | source
1. dxbydt ◴[] No.42143713[source]
96! Lived a full life. RIP.

I wrote a lot of QBASIC. 1986-90ish, old Bangalore. I was 12. There was no Mac or Unix or Windows in India those days. Only MSDOS. I had a 386 box. I would insert a 5.25" floppy, boot into command.com, then CD to GWBASIC.EXE and enter GWBASIC. Wrote a lot of GWBASIC to annoy friends and family by emitting high pitched sounds. You could do SOUND 2000+i, j, where i is the frequency & j was duration. You could even control volume from BASIC. I would put that in a WHILE WEND loop and make it go crazy. People didn't know how to turn it off once it got going. Then suddenly one day DOS went away and we had something called MS WINDOWS 3.1 and you had to insert a white round ball into a mouse and click on icons, no more command line, and even GWBASIC was gone, they put QBASIC and it came with snake program. Then I got into the graphics craze. We had a CGA & so I did SCREEN 2, then used LINE and CIRCLE to my heart's content. Few colors only. Then we upgraded to VGA monitor then SCREEN 12 was a full 640x480, I wrote QBASIC to make annoying sounds while drawing. It was an amazing childhood, thanks to this miracle language. BASIC led to something called CLIPPER, then I did some FOXPRO, got paid actual rupees to write an inventory control system in FOXPRO, then MFC, Borland C++...all the way upto today.

But it all started with BASIC. Amazing language. Thank you, Dr. Kurtz.

replies(2): >>42147457 #>>42150756 #
2. ◴[] No.42147457[source]
3. gtirloni ◴[] No.42150756[source]
Same here, owe him a lot it was also my first programming language (on 286's).

It's interesting that you mention GWBASIC specifically because that was also the BASIC I had access to. It doesn't seem this variant was popular in the US.

Also learned CLIPPER and created all sorts of tools and business apps. Yet another thing that seemed very localized.

replies(2): >>42156397 #>>42156507 #
4. 0points ◴[] No.42156397[source]
IIRC, I got GWBASIC from the official MSDOS 3.3 install discs. One had to write code using the EDLIN editor.

I live in Sweden.

PEEK and POKE:d my way to my very own computer.

5. dmd ◴[] No.42156507[source]
GW-BASIC was definitely quite present in the US, being the one shipped by Microsoft with DOS up until DOS 5.