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Byte Magazine Volume 07 Number 08 – Logo (1982)

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Re: Byte Magazine Volume 07 Number 08 – Logo (1982)

#31

My first contact (and love) with a computer was when I was attending a free computer introduction class, around 9-10 years old, and they showed us the familiar turtle of LOGO :-)

Cynthia Solomon has shared a treasure trove of rare classic videos of Seymour Papert, Marvin and Margaret Minsky, kids programming Logo and playing with turtles, and many other amazing things at the MIT AI Lab, MIT Media Lab, and Atari Cambridge Research:

https://www.youtube.com/user/cynthiaso/videos

Seymour Describes Turtle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDyym_9-E-g

Marvin Introduces Seymour:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W4zaMGQx9w

Turtle Lesson 1:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V_OPfmbbCk

Turtle Standard Route:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJlRGe5QGhs

Turtle Huck Fin Route:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTO-Ruby-Uo

About Logo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nisFUjnO87g

Talking Turtle 4:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkhE-371XdE

Talking Turtle 5:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxCpgi2R0w8

Logo's Yellow Turtle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeFhFPNO8hc

Seymour Papert on a Bongo Board Poked by Cynthia Solomon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Urn4y5kmtuU

Logo Programming 1970:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9vQSZvSABY

AI H264:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maDzjHIiXZc

2500 Marvin Short:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ

Atari Cambridge Research Lab part 1-6 (See http://logothings.wikispaces.com ):

1982 to 1984, research on a children's computer with object-oriented Logo, force feedback, gestural interactions, music and more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR2CwKculBU

Margaret Minsky demonstrates a gestural system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wq6SQTVM9M

It's 1984 and Ed Hardebeck shows a gestural system and Gary Drescher shows object-oriented Logo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClKQHgIoLPc

A force feedback joystick, a puppet machine and a program of dance and body movement are presented:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3qPCZ5z0UQ

David Levitt shows the music box:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocwsVkqEKys

Music box with Tom Trobaugh and drum machine with Jim Davis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhA0FGsin_s

1984's closing remarks by Marvin Minsky:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rg4a18svBQ

Re: Byte Magazine Volume 07 Number 08 – Logo (1982)

#32

LOGO was my first introduction to programming in 3rd grade back in 92-93 in Delhi/India.

Wow. Was that in school? In early 2010s my school was still teaching turbo c++ in 'computer science' curriculum, which was an optional subject in 11th grade.

We also had logo classes in school around the same time (I think it was 4th grade but may have been 3rd) in Israel.

However the teacher barely knew more programming than the kids and I didn’t realize Logo was more than a really weird drawing program until years later.

Re: Byte Magazine Volume 07 Number 08 – Logo (1982)

#33

I enjoyed a bit of Unix and C bashing here ( ): "Unix, C, and Pascal may be excellent teaching and development tools, but they may not be so good for commercial production work." ( ): https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-08/page/n19/m...

That was probably true back then. My understanding is that Unix wasn't ready for commercial production work until the late 80s at least.

Re: Byte Magazine Volume 07 Number 08 – Logo (1982)

#37

Byte, Incider and I think Winfall? The stuff of my childhood, and the Beagle Bros. So much time typing in pseudo code to the Apple and hoping it would work and wondering how the magic happened. Fond memories.

I think I have that Byte issue out in the garage :)

Re: Byte Magazine Volume 07 Number 08 – Logo (1982)

#38
From the mid eighties onward, BYTE was instrumental in steering me towards Computer Science with inspirational articles by people like Dick Pountain and Steven Ciarcia (and, to a much lesser degree, Pournelle, whose articles seemingly mainly consisted of him breaking stuff and being astounded by tech supporters who did not know Who He Was). It filled for a while, together with Dr. Dobb's Journal, a space between the hobbyist and trade magazines and the scientific journals (that at the time was well out of my reach) – a space that since became a void.

Re: Byte Magazine Volume 07 Number 08 – Logo (1982)

#39
post #5

For all the Logo fans out here, here are some more Logo resources: 1. IBM PC Logo executable and manual (1983): https://winworldpc.com/product/ibm-logo/100 2. Atari Logo executable and manuals (1983): https://atariwiki.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Logo 3. JSLogo (2009-2021): https://www.calormen.com/jslogo/ 4. Logo Exchange (1982-1999): https://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/resources/nlx/ 5. Matrix bridge to Libera Chat…

Thank you for that! Here's some more stuff I posted before in this previous discussion about the history of Logo:

History of Logo:

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1623m1p3

HN Discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23052300

Comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23054174

Here is the source code to LLogo in MACLISP, which I stashed from the MIT-AI ITS system. It's a fascinating historical document, 12,480 lines of beautiful practical lisp code, defining where the rubber meets the road, with drivers for hardware like pots, plotters, robotic turtles, TV turtles, graphical displays, XGP laser printers, music devices, and lots of other interesting code and comments. https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/lisp/llogo.lisp

Lars Brinkhoff got some of this code to run in MacLisp on an emulator! (I don't know how much of the historical hardware the emulator supports yet, but he's probably worked on some of that too. ;) )

https://github.com/PDP-10/its/issues/620

Thanks to Lars, here are two revisions of an AI Lab memo about LLOGO:

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-307.pdf

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-307a.pdf

And a Logo manual and glossary of PDP-11 Logo:

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-313.pdf

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-315.pdf

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-315a.pdf

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23054236

Lars Brinkhoff suggests that this thread comp.lang.logo with Brian Harvey and Leigh Klotz is required reading:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.logo/UqOvE...

Just a couple highlights from a detailed history of Logo that Brian and Leigh and others posted:

>From Brian Harvey:

>Many, many people have been involved in the development of Logo.

>Wally Feurzeig started the whole thing by organizing a group at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, Inc., to study the educational effects of teaching kids a programming language. The first language they used, like most programming languages, was focused on numeric computation, and it was Wally's idea that kids would find it more natural to work in an area they knew better, namely natural language; therefore, he set up a team to design a language featuring words and sentences. Wally made up the name "Logo."

>The team Wally put together at BBN included Seymour Papert and Dan Bobrow. The three of them are credited as the designers of the first version of the language; Dan wrote the first implementation. In a BBN report dated August, 1967, credit for additional work is given to Richard Grant, Cynthia Solomon, and Frank Frazier.

>Seymour later started a Logo group at MIT, where Logo development continued. The MIT versions of Logo were substantially different from the BBN ones, both in the notations used and in the things the language could do. Most notably, turtle graphics was added at MIT.

>Among the many people who contributed to the development of Logo at MIT, at the risk of leaving someone out, are Hal Abelson, Paul Goldenberg, Dan Watt, Gary Drescher, Steve Hain, Leigh Klotz, Andy diSessa, Brian Silverman... oh, lots of people.

>I think that most of the early documents are out of print now, but whatever documentation there is of the early efforts will be in the form of technical reports from BBN and from MIT. You may have to visit Cambridge to find them!

>From Leight Klotz:

>In the mid 1970's, when the AI Lab Lisp Machine project was just getting underway, Marvin Minsky and Danny Hillis (later to found Terrapin, and still later, Thinking Machines) put together a project to build a Logo machine. It had two components: a PDP-11 processor (the 3500) and a separate vector-graphics display (the 2500). Guy Montpetit, a Canadian entrepeneur, funded development eventually, and a company called General Turtle was formed. General Turtle built and sold the 2500/3500 system. Henry Minsky, then about 12, worked on the design of the 2500, using the Stanford Draw program, one of the early electronics CAD systems. (The 2500 had this really great barrell shifter stolen from the Lisp machine design, but it was later found not to work, so it was never used.) [...]

>[...] Like Brian, I've left out many people who worked on Logo over the years: Brian Fox and Flavio Rose worked for me at Terrapin on a contract basis briefly, as did vagabond programmer Devon McCullough (who used to dial in with a 300 baud modem he'd written in entirely software using the parallel game port, with an 80-column mixed-case display done with 3x5 pixel characters; when the modem detected the call waiting click on the line, it would make the Apple II speaker make the telephone ringing sound -- a feature which I just saw a US patent filed on, not by Devon.), and the frustrated Sinclar QX programmer, who I suspect doesn't want his name used. Of course, there were tons more people at the AI Lab in the pre-commercial days...

>From Lars Brinkhoff

>Hello,

>I'm mostly researching PDP-10 software, especially MIT's Incompatible Timesharing System.

>I have recently stumbled across some of the LOGO group work. I have a copy of the Dazzle Dart game that ran on their PDP-11/45. It uses the Tom Knight vector display controller, so it's not easy to run it.

>Maybe it would be possible to get the original MIT PDP-11 LOGO running.

>[...] It's running now.

>[...] Now also BBN PDP-10 Logo, MIT CLOGO, MIT Lisp Logo, and hopefully soon MIT Apple II Logo (direct ancestor of Terrapin Apple II Logo).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23058440

Terrapin Logo for the Apple ][ and C64 came with a 6502 assembler written in Logo by Leigh Klotz, that they used to write Logo primitives (for controlling the turtle, etc). It would be ambitious to make a self hosting 6502 Logo meta assembler, by porting the entire 6502 assembly language Logo source code to the 6502 Logo Assembler!

Leigh, wasn't the assembler that you used for the original Apple ][ version of Logo written in MacLisp running on a PDP-10?

The Apple II Source Code for the LOGO Language Found (adafruit.com) 379 points by mmastrac on Oct 4, 2018 | hide | past | web | favorite | 89 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18142287

https://blog.adafruit.com/2018/10/04/the-apple-ii-source-cod...

Lars: The link in the article to the code from https://github.com/PDP-10/its is broken. I found a few references to it in the repo. Did you have to take it down, or did you move it somewhere else?

https://github.com/PDP-10/its/tree/master/src/aplogo

>Logo

>"I too see the computer presence as a potent influence on the human mind. I am very much aware of the holding power of an interactive computer and of how taking the computer as a model can influence the way we think about ourselves. In fact the work on LOGO to which I have devoted much of the past years consists precisely of developing such forces in positive directions."

>Seymour Papert

>"Logo is the name for a philosophy of education and for a continually evolving family of computer languages that aid its realization."

>Harold Abelson

>"Historically, this idea that Logo is mainly turtle graphics is a mistake. Logo’s name comes from the Greek word for word, because Logo was first designed as a language in which to manipulate language: words and sentences."

>Brian Harvey

>Logo was initially created by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, Daniel G.Bobrow, Cynthia Solomon and Richard Grant in 1967 as part of a National Science Foundation sponsored research project conducted at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1969 Dr. Seymour Papert started the Logo Group at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. Throughout the 1970s the majority of Logo development was conducted at MIT in the Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Division for Study and Research in Education, using large research computer systems, such as ITS powered PDP-10.

>Our goal is to make that early Logo systems available to a wider audience of enthusiasts for exploration, experimenting and, of course, hacking.

[...]

>MIT APLOGO

>In accordance with Leigh L Klotz Jr., Hal Abelson directed the Logo for the Apple II project at MIT.

>MIT APLOGO was developed by Stephen Hain, Patrick G. Sobalvarro and Leigh L Klotz Jr. It was developed and cross-compilled for the Apple-II-Plus Personal Microcomputer on PDP-10 at the MIT LOGO Group. It is direct predecessor for Terrapin Logo. We have a source code for assembling an improved version from 7/9/81 at its/src/aplogo

Re: Byte Magazine Volume 07 Number 08 – Logo (1982)

#40

Byte, Incider and I think Winfall? The stuff of my childhood, and the Beagle Bros. So much time typing in pseudo code to the Apple and hoping it would work and wondering how the magic happened. Fond memories.

I used to do the same, typing in either Applebasic code and/or 6502 assembly for some program I found in another Apple-centric magazine called Nibble (great covers, BTW). It never worked the first time so I had to go line-by-line to try and find the errors. I'd finally get it working, play with it a bit, and then forget about it.

Great times!

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