RIP Thomas Kurtz, Co-creator of BASIC

RIP Thomas Kurtz, Co-creator of BASIC

US
Computer Language Inspired a Generation of Musicians      17/11/24

Thomas Kurtz, co-founder of the BASIC programming language, has passed away at the age of 96. In the 1980’s BASIC (the Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was instrumental in the popularization of computer programming, which had begun to break out of it’s academic trappings; becoming accessible to everyone.

The BASIC language grew out of the Dartmouth Time Sharing System which Kurtz and his collaborator, John Kemeny, developed during the early 1960’s. The operating system allowed students at Dartmouth College (Hanover, US) unprecedented access to computing facilities. The first BASIC program ran on 1 May 1964 at 4 a.m. ET; reportedly, a simple command:

PRINT 2 + 2

BASIC’s popularity as a language grew. Bill Gates & Paul Allen developed the first Microcomputer version (the MITS Altair 8800) in 1975, and through the 1980’s nearly every popular computer had a version of BASIC on-board. This happened despite protests by Kurtz’s peers:

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration – Edsger Dijkstra.

Musical Avenues

All versions of BASIC feature a number of core commands. PRINT instructs the computer to display characters on the screen, GOTO allows you to jump back or forward to another line of code, etc etc. However, with wildly differing host hardware each version of BASIC included it’s own features & foibles. This extends to how BASIC addresses audio hardware – sound chips, MIDI IO, etc.

This is why certain computers running certain variants of BASIC were musically useful. For many of us, growing up in the 80’s & 90’s, they were the beginning of a journey – the first time we could assemble music notes & play them back. Let’s take a look at a few, but by no means all, of these musical computers.

BEEP!

Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum was my first computer. I’ve written about the machine’s musical heritage before (see Computer Music Chronicles: Audio on 1982’s ZX Spectrum) but today I’d like to highlight how BASIC was a new gateway to sound & music.

The original rubber-keyed 16/48K model seems musically primitive on paper. Outside of external expansions (like the RAM Music Machine) you only get a monophonic square-wave beeper. Still, if you manipulate that square quickly enough (and we can do that very quickly!) a range of pretty charming sound effects can be made. I talk a little about 1-bit music in the chronicles article – and that often contains wildly creative beeper use, but most of our early experiments probably sounded like this:

Things progressed with the later 128K models; an option for MIDI out via a relatively simple DIY RS232 > MIDI Cable (earlier models required costly interfaces) and built-in “3 Square Channels + Noise” AY sound.

The MIDI thing was interesting, because 128 BASIC allowed you to code advanced MIDI music. The new PLAY command allowed you to set your note value, note length, MIDI channel, volume, BPM etc. As proof, here’s Daniel Reid who coded a full rave track on his custom rack-mounted Speccy!

CX5M Awesomeness

Alongside systems like the BBC Music 500 and Alpha Syntauri, Yamaha’s CX5M was marketed not only as a computer (a bang-average MSX1 variant) but a complete music-making system. Endowed with a midi-capable* SFG-05 4-operator FM cartridge (*an earlier variant had no MIDI support) the system could run both standard MSX software and specialist applications. Expansion cartridges included a sequencer and a DX7 voicing program, neat!

Of relevance to this article, the YRM-104 FM Music Macro cartridge adds a number of commands like INST(rument), PHRASE, RHYTHM & TEMPO to BASIC. One of the criticisms levelled at BASIC (and indeed, all high-level languages) is sluggishness and indeed, some reviews state that this cartridge taxes the CX5M’s Z80 CPU a little too much to program anything useful. Still, as an obsolete gear enthusiast, I’d love to try this one out. Here’s a cute little demo included with the cartridge:

Commodore 64

I couldn’t finish this article without mentioning that old camel lozenge, the machine with a 12-year run & legendary status: the C64. With a flexible, hybrid synthesizer chip inside, designed by Bob Yannes – “SID”, the 64 changed computer music forever.

C64 BASIC has a few drawbacks; notably, in a stock configuration, the graphics commands are quite unfriendly – a bunch of PEEKS & POKES. It’s the same story for the sound commands, unfortunately – but immense power is there if you can get over that first hurdle: envelopes, amplitude modulation, PWM, clocked digital noise and even filtering.

Luckily, there’s a rather quirky book called Make your Commodore 64 sing by Ed Bogas, which contains a bunch of listings. The book covers everything from tuneful 3-part melodies to bizarre sound effects, yet it’s the material’s presentation which is most notable! The listings are strung together by a narrative that centres on PJ Roberts, a budding composer who is abducted by aliens. It’s as bizarre as it sounds!

So it seems I started with a eulogy and ended up with alien abduction. I think that this deftly illustrates the scope of Kurtz and Kemeny’s contributions. They didn’t necessarily make the thing, they instead made the thing that allowed people to make the thing. Their language? A framework for endless coding adventures; it just so happened that some of those adventures were musical.

Posted by MagicalSynthAdventure an expert in synthesis technology from last Century and Amiga enthusiast.

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