BASIC's creators used a similar computer four years later to develop the programming language. Credit: GE / Wikipedia A brochure for the GE 210 computer from 1964.

On Tuesday, we published my piece celebrating the 50th anniversary of BASIC, the programming language — created by John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz at Dartmouth College — that played an enormous role ...

Either programming a computer was exceptionally hard and should be left to the experts, or it was something that should be democratized, as BASIC had already done. Not both.

Thomas E. Kurtz with an early computer at Dartmouth in the early 1960s. He worked to make computers more accessible to all students, not just those in technical fields — a novel idea at the time.