TORTIS (Not quite Logo)

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Hello,

This is not quite Logo, but closely related. Do you remember how there
were experiments teaching programming to children too small to use Logo?
It was done by Radia Perlman, who would later go on to become a
networking guru. She called her program TORTIS, "toddler's own
recursive turtle interpreter system". It's described in two memos from
the MIT AI lab.

I found a copy, and got permission from Perlman to publish it:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its-vault/blob/master/files/radia/tortis.31

It talks to teletype port number 16. Input is from a button box and is
decoded to send commands, also to port 16. The output is to a physical
floor turtle.

I would be happy to work with someone to emulate this in software. The
TORTIS program would be running on a PDP-10 emulator, and port 16 is
available as a network TCP port. I suggest there could be a GUI with
the buttons, and a turtle to draw lines on the screen.

[mich...@media.mit.edu]

MIT Logo Memo 9, written by Radia Perlman i1974 is about TORTIS. It's linked from http://web.sonoma.edu/users/l/luvisi/logo/logo.memos.html