November 28, 2024: Thomas E. Kurtz, 1928-2024

[RoboAdmin]

November 28, 2024: Thomas E. Kurtz, 1928-2024

Read this article on the Illuminator.

[pmpappas]

10 PRINT "R.I.P."
20 END

Sad news. I wrote a lot of code in BASIC (with occasional machine language assists) on various platforms before I moved to C and beyond. I still remember how frustrating it was when Microsoft's BASIC interpreter executed code differently than it's BASIC compiler. Good times. ;-)

[Rendu]

The Before Times... when rocks were still soft and puppies were the oldest things on Earth. i.e. 1974

Volunteering in the high school library my freshman year, bored because no one is checking out books, I flip through one of the textbooks for THE computer science course that only seniors are allowed to take, with the instructor's permission. You didn't even get your own textbook, you had to sign one out and return it to the desk. I expect to be mystified. Instead, it makes perfect sense. It's simple, actually. Had to wait three more years to get access to the computer (no monitor with a blinking cursor- a hard-copy thermal printer connected to Syracuse University's mainframe with a telephone and an acoustic coupler. One of my classmates wrote a program whose sole purpose was to make the coupler play "The Stars and Stripes Forever" with its little trills and squawks.)
But BASIC was the portal into that world of the future. Thank you, Thomas E. Kurtz.

[pmpappas]

Originally Posted by Rendu

... I flip through one of the textbooks for THE computer science course that only seniors are allowed to take ... I expect to be mystified. Instead, it makes perfect sense. It's simple, actually. ...

Oh wow. Your reaction compels me to share my experience.

My high school had an ASR 33 teletype complete with oiled paper tape punch / reader, connected by acoustic coupler to the local university's PDP-11. It was as loud as it was slow and located in a tiny room off the chemistry lab. I was in the lab because I planned to be a biologist at the time and found myself drawn to the noise, just to find out what the heck was going on. Turns out a kid was playing Super Star Trek (iykyk). I asked how it worked and as the next class was about to begin, he started a program listing which was going to take forever to print and rather facetiously told me to come back at the end of the day to pick it up. That afternoon as I read through it I thought "Heck I can do this." So to test that theory I coded a simple game that generated a "random" number between 1 and 100 and asked you to guess it. You were told if you were low, high, or correct. Once you guessed it, based on a divide and conquer strategy there were three possible outcomes. If it took less guesses than expected you were lucky, if it took the minimum you were logical, and if it took more you were irrational. Next day I showed him my program and asked how to get it into the machine. Freaked the kid out but he showed me how to type it in. Other than writing If-Then-Else as If-Then-Otherwise the program ran as written. Long story short after I got busted in chemistry class for writing code, I realized my life was going to take a different path.

I suppose to draw from Dilbert (yes, I know about the creator) we have "The Knack", or perhaps more accurately "The Hack". ;-)

[stefanj]

Well, that's a good long life, and one with a major accomplishment. RIP.



I wrote a LOT of BASIC progs right up to 1993 or so, when I started learning C. I should have jumped to more sophisticated languages earlier, TBH.



I wrote at least once commercial program, whose title I forget. It was an educational thing about color mixing. I, know I recall: Colortrope.



The last time I opened BASIC code was when I was learning Python a couple of years back. I converted an ancient BASIC space battle game called Deep Space (which I first played in 1975!) to Python. It was a fun exercise. The limitations of early BASIC were apparent.



My go to "hacking" (as in, get code written quickly, not crime) language of choice these days is Perl.



I understand that Python is used a lot in schools, because it is the language of Arduinos and Raspberry Pi and so on.

[andreww]

BASIC is right up there with The Fantasy Trip in terms of teaching my brain how to see things. It gets a bad wrap from people who say it taught bad programming habits. It definitely did, but the alternative was not programming at all or learning Fortran, which was nigh unlearnable and also taught bad programming habits.

I wrote some gaming code in Fortran (a baboon generator for Runequest, I think), but I wrote a lot more in BASIC, including a Car Wars vehicle editor that grew to big for the 48K of RAM in the Apple II+. I had to cut features because it wouldn't run! That was some good BASIC on that machine...