Thomas Kurtz, creator of BASIC, has died at 96. Unlike later language creators (Kernighan and Ritchie, Linus Torvalds), Kurtz’s name isn’t famous. I’d never heard it before.
BASIC taught programming to a whole generation. In early PCs, Basica was right there when you turned on the computer. You just started typing commands and making fun things happen. As you got more serious, you began exploring machine codes and learning how to call machine codes from Basica (using POKE and PEEK), which made far more interesting things possible.
40 years later, I still type basica when I mean basic, and have to correct it every time.
Polistra's Mill 