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Spacewar written in Apple Logo

paleotronic.com

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Re: Spacewar written in Apple Logo

#11

Post by reaperducer »

There was a very interesting letter to the editor in Byte magazine in the late 70's (?) that I re-read recently.

It was from the guy who wrote Logo for MIT. He was really quite mad, and surprisingly candid about how MIT was screwing with his project.

He claimed that he'd made a perfectly lovely, functional Logo for the Apple //, but MIT wouldn't release it. He felt like it should be released because the whole reason he was asked to make it was so that it could be released to the public for public benefit ("Public domain" software, similar to "open source" for you young 'uns).

He contended that MIT was withholding Logo from the public because Texas Instruments was a big donor to MIT and asked that it not release Logo. TI, he said, only wanted Logo to exist on the 99/4A, to help boost sales in the educational market.

This aligns with my memories of the day, when Logo was only a TI 99/4A product for a very long time. I don't remember if it ever make it to Commodore or CP/M machines, which is where I was at the time.

Anyway, it's an interesting tale because it shows that corporate interference in this sort of thing is nothing new.

Plus, Logo!

Re: Spacewar written in Apple Logo

#12

Post by jhbadger »

jrd259 wrote: post #7
protomyth wrote: post #6

Logo sucked you in with the turtle graphics and making cool shapes. It is basically a computer etch-a-sketch, but it does get boring at some point. I am so grateful that I had a teacher that pointed out there was an amazing language just past cute turtles. Logo was a real change from programming in BASIC, FORTH, and 6502 assembler. It was one thing to read about all the cool languages in Byte Magazine, but it was qui…

Logo was more than turtle graphics. It also provided list processing with slightly friendlier names: Logo BUTFIRST is Lisp's CDR. This makes possible a great deal of purely linguistic programming, e.g. "20 questions game", text based adventure, etc. (I was one of the implementors of Logo for Apple II.)

Exactly. Logo was trying to turn kids into Lisp programmers in the same sense that BASIC was a kid's version of classic FORTRAN.

Re: Spacewar written in Apple Logo

#13

Post by sehugg »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #9
zellyn wrote: post #3

The paleotronic folks have been on fire lately. Their Apple II emulator, microM8 is fast becoming one of the most advanced, cross-platform emulators. https://paleotronic.com/microm8/

How do I contribute? I recently used ADTPro to copy a lot of old Apple II software onto my MacBook Pro as DSK images. 5.25 floppies: https://mega.nz/#!yDITXIZC!8fREZdAruk2yYLv859jKABGSWeG4UkRoC... https://www.flickr.com/photos/150180606@N08/sets/72157672562... https://www.flickr.com/photos/150180606@N08/sets/72157672589... I've also got a larger selection of DD floppies, HD floppies, JAZ disks, SCSI disks, IDE disks,…

You might want to contact Jason Scott at the Internet Archive, especially if some of those are copy-protected: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5180

Re: Spacewar written in Apple Logo

#14

Post by protomyth »

jrd259 wrote: post #7
protomyth wrote: post #6

Logo sucked you in with the turtle graphics and making cool shapes. It is basically a computer etch-a-sketch, but it does get boring at some point. I am so grateful that I had a teacher that pointed out there was an amazing language just past cute turtles. Logo was a real change from programming in BASIC, FORTH, and 6502 assembler. It was one thing to read about all the cool languages in Byte Magazine, but it was qui…

Logo was more than turtle graphics. It also provided list processing with slightly friendlier names: Logo BUTFIRST is Lisp's CDR. This makes possible a great deal of purely linguistic programming, e.g. "20 questions game", text based adventure, etc. (I was one of the implementors of Logo for Apple II.)

thus I said I am so grateful that I had a teacher that pointed out there was an amazing language just past cute turtles.

Re: Spacewar written in Apple Logo

#15

Post by ken »

reaperducer wrote: post #11

There was a very interesting letter to the editor in Byte magazine in the late 70's (?) that I re-read recently. It was from the guy who wrote Logo for MIT. He was really quite mad, and surprisingly candid about how MIT was screwing with his project. He claimed that he'd made a perfectly lovely, functional Logo for the Apple //, but MIT wouldn't release it. He felt like it should be released because the whole reason…

Logo was definitely on the Commodore 64! I had it as a kid. My impression at the time (having only used BASIC and 6502 assembly) was that it was a little weird, and incredibly slow.

The 6502 just doesn't have enough CPU/RAM to do anything where you need a powerful language -- or to run a self-hosted compiler (I assume that's what it was). It was easy to draw "high resolution" lines (at 320x200, or about twice the pixel count of a fingertip-sized iOS icon) but it was so slow you could see each line being drawn. The compiler ran at "go take a snack break" speed, even for short programs.

It was possible to make the 6502 run faster than its clock speed suggested, but you needed to take advantage of features (like zero page) that HLLs didn't seem to be able to optimize for. I didn't use a compiler until we got a 16-bit computer, and I didn't like them until I got a 32-bit computer.

Re: Spacewar written in Apple Logo

#16

Post by abstractbeliefs »

sehugg wrote: post #13
peterburkimsher wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I contribute? I recently used ADTPro to copy a lot of old Apple II software onto my MacBook Pro as DSK images. 5.25 floppies: https://mega.nz/#!yDITXIZC!8fREZdAruk2yYLv859jKABGSWeG4UkRoC... https://www.flickr.com/photos/150180606@N08/sets/72157672562... https://www.flickr.com/photos/150180606@N08/sets/72157672589... I've also got a larger selection of DD floppies, HD floppies, JAZ disks, SCSI disks, IDE disks,…

You might want to contact Jason Scott at the Internet Archive, especially if some of those are copy-protected: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5180

I know HN doesn't really do "this" or "me too" comments, but I want to underline this isn't just another option, this is the canonical option. Jason Scott is really an important and respected archivist and the IA should really be the first port of call before anyone looks at sending disks elsewhere.

Re: Spacewar written in Apple Logo

#17

Post by reaperducer »

ken wrote: post #15
reaperducer wrote: post #11

There was a very interesting letter to the editor in Byte magazine in the late 70's (?) that I re-read recently. It was from the guy who wrote Logo for MIT. He was really quite mad, and surprisingly candid about how MIT was screwing with his project. He claimed that he'd made a perfectly lovely, functional Logo for the Apple //, but MIT wouldn't release it. He felt like it should be released because the whole reason…

Logo was definitely on the Commodore 64! I had it as a kid. My impression at the time (having only used BASIC and 6502 assembly) was that it was a little weird, and incredibly slow. The 6502 just doesn't have enough CPU/RAM to do anything where you need a powerful language -- or to run a self-hosted compiler (I assume that's what it was). It was easy to draw "high resolution" lines (at 320x200, or about twice the pix…

The 6502 just doesn't have enough CPU/RAM to do anything where you need a powerful language

I'm not sure about this assertion. Pretty much every major high-level language of the time was available for the 64, including C, FORTH, FORTRAN, COBOL, and I think even PASCAL.

Re: Spacewar written in Apple Logo

#18

Post by EvanAnderson »

reaperducer wrote: post #11

There was a very interesting letter to the editor in Byte magazine in the late 70's (?) that I re-read recently. It was from the guy who wrote Logo for MIT. He was really quite mad, and surprisingly candid about how MIT was screwing with his project. He claimed that he'd made a perfectly lovely, functional Logo for the Apple //, but MIT wouldn't release it. He felt like it should be released because the whole reason…

You sent me down a rabbit hole looking for this (the Internet Archive has a bunch of issues of Byte digitized and OCR'd) and, while I didn't find it, I did find this very interesting post from 1995 re: the history of LOGO: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.logo/UqOvE...

If anybody else went down that particular rabbit hole they might find that link interesting too.

Re: Spacewar written in Apple Logo

#19

Post by reificator »

zellyn wrote: post #4
zellyn wrote: post #3

The paleotronic folks have been on fire lately. Their Apple II emulator, microM8 is fast becoming one of the most advanced, cross-platform emulators. https://paleotronic.com/microm8/

Oh, and it's written in Go . (Cue incoming comments (a) asking me why it's relevant what language it's written in, and (b) talking about how much better it would be if it were written in Rust. :-) )

(c) How do you even write Hello World in a language without generics?

Re: Spacewar written in Apple Logo

#20

Post by Someone »

reaperducer wrote: post #17
ken wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logo was definitely on the Commodore 64! I had it as a kid. My impression at the time (having only used BASIC and 6502 assembly) was that it was a little weird, and incredibly slow. The 6502 just doesn't have enough CPU/RAM to do anything where you need a powerful language -- or to run a self-hosted compiler (I assume that's what it was). It was easy to draw "high resolution" lines (at 320x200, or about twice the pix…

The 6502 just doesn't have enough CPU/RAM to do anything where you need a powerful language I'm not sure about this assertion. Pretty much every major high-level language of the time was available for the 64, including C, FORTH, FORTRAN, COBOL, and I think even PASCAL.

Even pascal? Pascal can be compiled (1) in a single pass. That makes it easier to write a compiler for it than C if memory is tight.

And indeed: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Pascal lists seven different pascal compilers for the C64; https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/C lists only four C compilers. I don’t know how complete these implementations were.

(1) not optimally, but many people would compare the speed and size of compiled code with interpreted Basic (if you really needed speed, you would use assembly), so that often didn’t matter much.

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