Thomas E. Kurtz (1928 - Present)
Thomas Eugene Kurtz, born on February 22, 1928, in Oak Park , Illinois, is a retired Dartmouth professor who graduated from Knox College in 1950 and received his Ph.D at Princeton University six years later. The same year when receiving his Ph.D, Kurtz became a mathematics professor at Dartmouth. In 1963, Kurtz co-designed, with John G. Kemeny, the first computer programming language called BASIC (Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.) This was for Dartmouth’s experimental time-sharing system. Then in 1983, they came up with TrueBasic, an updated version from their last computer language program. Thomas Kurtz received the Computer Pioneer Award in 1991 and in 1994, was listed as a fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery.