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Professors John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz along with a band of Dartmouth undergraduates invent the Basic computer language.

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BASIC - Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It's the simplest high-level form of code developed by John G. Kemeny & Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth university. BASIC was designed so that any one knew basic code so as to speed up the current for of sending messages through computers. The way that was used before was you would write out your message and then hand it to an operator who would then translate it into code. BASIC eliminated the middle man in the sense that you could put your message directly into the computer rather than writing it out and having an operator do it for you. This also allowed for more confidentiality between persons. Dartmouth BASIC was a compiler, which meant that it converted your entire program in one fell swoop into machine code that the computer could understand

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Thomas E. Kurtz - Education: BA, Knox College, 1950; PhD, mathematics/statistics, Princeton University, 1956. Professional Experience: Dartmouth College: instructor, mathematics, 1956-1958, assistant professor, 1958-1963, associate professor, 1963-1966; professor, 1966-1993, director, Computing Center, 1959-1975, director, Kiewit Computation Center, 1966-1975, director, Office of Academic Computing, 1975-1978, vice chair and chair, Program in Computing and Information Science, 1979-1988; member, Pierce Panel, President's Science Advisory Council in Higher Education, 1965-1967; chairman, Council, EDUCOM, 1973-1974.

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"The public has been sold the most complicated word processing systems imaginable, when all they want to do is to write a letter." -Thomas E. Kurtz. This quote by Kurtz tells exactly what he and Kemeny had in mind when they came together to make BASIC. They made BASIC as a simpler way to write an online letter and send it to someone via the new form of communication the internet.

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John G. Kemeny died at age 66, he revolutionised computing and mathematics education at Dartmouth College and later, as president, also made sweeping social changes. Born in Budapest, Kemeny went to the US in 1940 and his undergraduate work at Princeton was interrupted while he worked on the Manhattan Project. John von Neumann and Leo Szilard at Los Alamos, wrote his Ph.D. thesis with Alonzo Church, and was a research assistant to Albert Einstein. He was on his way to a distinguished scholarly career at Princeton when instead he accepted the challenge of developing a new mathematics department at an Ivy League college which was certainly not known as a centre of excellence in mathematics. Kemeny came to Dartmouth aged 27 and was given freedom to develop a mathematics programme. Even at this age, he showed his abilities. His first book, The Philosopher Looks at Science (1959) was warmly received. Given a complex problem, be it mathematical, political, or social, John could come up with a simple, elegant and practical solution.

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"The man ignorant of mathematics will be increasingly limited in his grasp of the main forces of civilization."

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The impact/significance of BASIC is that it was the first type of computer language to be well known meaning that people before this hadn't really known what went into, or how to use code on a computer which was a very limiting factor when it came to the designing of programs or sending messages/pictures.

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https://www.britannica.com/technology/BASIC
http://time.com/69316/basic/
U.S.A. Sixties Vol. 1 5
http://history.computer.org/pioneers/kurtz.html
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/Kemeny_obit.html
http://www.theopensourcery.com/vbclones.htm
http://cis-alumni.org/tkurtz.html