I wrote my first line of BASIC in 1976, if I remember correctly! I was 15 years old, and my dad and I went to a trade fair. There was an IBM booth there. A man invited me to try a moon-landing game. It was on an IBM 5100. I asked my dad what happened to the characters that scrolled off the top of the screen! Since he wasn’t at all into tech, he asked the IBM engineer to explain it to me. And that’s when I knew it was my thing! I wrote my first few lines of BASIC right there! The following year, there was a Hewlett Packard booth where an HP-9825A (I think?) was drawing Lissajous figures on a plotter. I was mesmerized! The next year, I start working during my holidays to buy an HP-25. The year after that, I got a TRS-80 Model 1 Level II and started programming it in BASIC. I didn’t know much at the time. I even bought the Editor/Assembler, thinking it would increase the screen resolution! After that, it was an Atari ST (with Megamax C and GFA BASIC), and then PCs with a whole variety of languages ...

What has always impressed me is that some people managed, in just a few days, weeks, or months, to invent languages used by millions of people, sometimes for their entire lives! What an impact!

Mr. Kurtz, you may not have created the best language, but what you did create brought joy and inspired a whole generation of young programmers. Joy that, I feel, has somewhat faded today. Unless you’re coding in Rust!

Thank you, Mr. Kurtz!