In 1956, he was recruited to Dartmouth College by John G. Kemeny and joined the Mathematics Department, where he taught statistics and numerical analysis.

[6][7] From 1963 to 1964, Kurtz and Kemeny, working with a team of students, led the development of the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS) and the BASIC programming language.

DTSS allowed multiple users at separate terminals to share the processing power of a single machine, replacing a system of exclusive reservations.

[13] In 1974, the American Federation of Information Processing Societies gave an award to Kurtz and Kemeny at the National Computer Conference for their work on BASIC and time-sharing.

As part of the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, Kemeny and Kurtz created the programming language BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code).

[19] Kurtz's work on BASIC was recognized by the IEEE as part of their milestone program, which marks historic places for human innovation from around the world.

[20] In 1983, Kemeny, Kurtz, and four former Dartmouth students established True BASIC with the goal of introducing a modern commercial version of BASIC that would address the fragmentation caused by numerous incompatible dialects of the language, which were developed for early personal computers with limited memory and hardware-specific limitations.

True BASIC featured structured programming constructs such as a do-loop and else-if and support for multiple operating systems.

The company had annual revenues above $1 million in two years, according to the CEO in 1997, but the rise of integrated BASIC implementations, particularly from Microsoft, and declining demand for standalone programming tools limited its market reach.

[21] A 2004 interview noted sales of about 3,000 copies of True BASIC annually, primarily to high school students and hobbyists who had learned the language decades earlier.