With deep sadness, we say goodbye to computer pioneer Thomas Kurtz.
Thomas Eugene Kurtz (Feb. 22 1928–Nov. 12, 2024) was an American mathematician, computer scientist and co-inventor, with John Kemeny, of the BASIC programming language and Dartmouth Timesharing System.
In the early days of academic computing in the 1960s, there were no simple non-professional programming languages available for undergraduates. BASIC was aimed at this audience. To realize their vision, Kurtz and Kemeny concurrently developed the Dartmouth Timesharing System, allowing BASIC to be accessed by students around campus using Teletype terminals.
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BASIC - Briskly Achieve Solutions Impossible-in C 
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Was the DTS model a completely new idea at the time? Looking back on it, it seems a rather odd way of doing things:
- a relatively small input processor manages I/O from all the user’s terminals, compiling each line and sending it to
- a much larger main processor that runs each line as a job, sending the results back to the input processor to distribute to the users.
I may have picked up the details wrongly from Joy Lisi Rankin’s book “A People’s History of Computing in the United States”, though. I know that the two-processor model for timesharing BASIC systems persisted for a while. The HP 2000 BASIC system requires two synchronized processors, which makes it an amusing evening’s diversion to emulate using simh.
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I was intrigued! I found some juicy details written up in this 14 page PDF.
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Is this not the extension of IO channel processors?
One main frame and satellite processing?
Does the BASIC interpreter use virtual memory for each job? (DATA).
I assume they all run the from same code.
The preservation status of DTSS and BASIC is not good. I collected some scraps here: GitHub - larsbrinkhoff/dtss-backup: Backup of DTSS and Dartmouth BASIC
I would hope there is more! E.g. the 635 versions.
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