Getting LOGO
Jose Arcilla
Thanks for the response to my ill formed query regarding LOGO.
I am actually trying to obtain versions of LOGO that run under the DOS and
Windows environments, prefably Windows. I have recently obtained two versions of
the language, these being ucblogo, and mswlogo.
Do you know of any implementation in a Visual language (c/c++/basic/delphi) ?
I am also after information regarding the history and development of LOGO by
Seymour Papert, Wallace Feurzieg, and Daniel Bobrow (were these the only
developers ?).
Any information you could supply would be most appreciated.
Cheers
Jose Arcilla.
(PS. Thanks for the internet address, it proved very useful !)
Brian Harvey
>I am also after information regarding the history and development of LOGO by
>Seymour Papert, Wallace Feurzieg, and Daniel Bobrow (were these the only
>developers ?).
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!
George Mills
I'm sorry I don't understand your question.
MswLogo is written in Borland C++ which is about as visual
as VC++.
Leigh L Klotz Jr
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.)
Anyway, the 2500 was a true vector graphic display: the turtle
commands added to a display list, and the vector processor moved the
electron beam across the display tube, repeatedly tracing the display
list. There was no raster scan bitmap, which saved on memory and
processing speed, and hence cost. One of the really neat things you
could do was issue SPIN and GROW turtle commands, in addition to RIGHT
and FORWARD. SPIN caused the all succeeding commands (until a
CLEARSCREEN, of course) to rotate at the specified rotation rate.
(It's as if you had put the turtle at the center of a spinning plate at that point,
and then done all further drawing on the plate.) GROW was analogous,
drawing a line which grew in the FORWARD direction at the specified
speed. Hal Abelson and Andy diSessa spent days going over the group
theoretics of SPIN and GROW. Simple turtle geometry programs with FD
and RT replaced by SPIN and GROW produce amazing mindblowing displays.
Sprites don't even come close to what SPIN and GROW can do, in terms
of intellectual stimulation for all ages.
Alas, the world was not ready for Logo machines, and General Turtle crawled
to Canada and became Societe Tortue General, and the 3500 became a
desktop word processor, and eventually the company went out of business.
Meanwhile, back at the AI Lab, in the late 1970's Henry Lieberman and
Kenneth Kahn (I think) wrote a version of Logo in Maclisp for the
PDP-10. It compiled Logo procedures into Lisp and then executed the
Lisp, displaying on a 512x512 pixel green tube CRT driven by an
auxillary PDP-11 with 16 display buffers. The problem with the LLOGO
approach was that Logo parsing is ambiguous: it depends on the number
of arguments to a function, so if you redefined a function to take a
different number of arguments (for example, if you made an error), you
had to go define everything that called it again.
Around 1977-1978, Gary Drescher and someone else whose name escapes me at
the moment wrote a version of Logo in Pascal, as part of a project
with Texas Instruments, for the TI 99/4 Home Computer, because Pascal
was the only high-level language supported. They finished it and
compiled it, and it produced something like a 300Kb program. That
doesn't sound like much, but considering that the TI 99/4 in its most
burly configuration had 32Kb, it was tremendous.
So, the Logo Lab hired Edward Hardebeck to be a human compiler for the
TI 99/4. The machine had twice as many registers as a PDP-11, but
only half as many addressing modes, so it wasn't possible to implement
a PUSH/POP stack for function call and return, or for data push and
pop, in a single instruction. Furthermore, all but 256 bytes of the
memory was accessed off-chip through a 12-clock-cycle interface. In
other words, most of the time, the machine ran at 1/12th of its designed
speed, which was pretty slow in the first place.
The machine had register windows, which is much like current RISC
processors, and the 256 bytes were intended for those. Ed implemented
some common subroutines in part of the 256 bytes, and used the rest
for registers.
Anyway, the machine had a SPRITE chip, which was the result of a
collaboration between Danny Hillis and TI. The idea of a SPRITE chip
was Danny's bachelor's thesis... The idea of getting out Logo on such
a machine, and the possibility of having the first microcomputer
version of Logo available for use in real schools, pushed everyone on.
TI had a couple of programmers assigned to the project in Texas, and
they did the final work of shoehorning everything in to fit into the
99/4 -- we're talking about a few hundred bytes here and there total.
It must have been grueling work. For example, they shortened all
abbreviations to two letters -- memory was that tight.
In 1979, a high school freshmen named Stephen Hain came (who had
previously come to the Logo Lab on an NSF-sponsored summer program)
started working at the Logo Lab as a part-time job during school. Hal
Abelson assigned him the task of producing an Apple II version of
Logo. The Apple II wasn't yet a big success. In fact, I believe Bill
Gates had sold Apple the BASIC for it for a small flat rate -- he
didn't think it was worth collecting royalties on. Hain read a book
ont the 6502 instruction set, and wrote about 300 pages of 6502 code,
based on Gary Drescher's PLOGO model. There was not a single comment
in the entire file.
One day he cross-compiled it on a PDP-10, and downloaded it to an
Apple II with a 16Kb memory extension ("language") card. It didn't
work.
The Logo Lab hired Patrick Sobalvarro to fix things. After one
month, he got it to initialize and then crash.
Patrick moved on to write the screen editor, based on Craig Finseth's
bachelor's thesis ``A Cookbook for EMACS,'' which described how to
implement a redisplay for an EMACS-like editor. Back then, editors
still had ``insert mode'' and ``overwrite mode,'' and it was a big
deal to be in ``insert mode,'' because you had to move characters over
and do memory intensive operations, and it was slow. Nowadays, nobody
would use an overwrite-mode editor, but back then it was a radical move
to have such an editor in a machine. It wasn't until the Macintosh
came out in 1984 that the idea of always being in insert mode and
having an explicit delete key won out in the popular mindset!
Anyway, after a year or so in 1980, I dropped out of MIT and joined
the Logo lab as a Sponsored Research Staff member. I helped finish
the Logo, and turned it into something ready for release to the world.
Since the NSF had funded its development, there was a big question as
to how to turn the results into a product. It was an early test case
for the productization of NSF-sponsored university research. The
final decision was to offer licenses to all qualified comers. Five
companies stepped forward: Terrapin, Krell, and three others who
dropped out. Patrick and I went to Terrapin, which we had goaded into
buying a license. Terrapin was at the time moribund, with only some
floor turtle robot kits left, and one part-time employee (the
bookkeeper).
Around this time, Guy Montpetit reappeared from Canada, with offers
to create a new company. He founded Logo Computer Systems, Inc.,
and based it in Boston, in the North End, I think. While Patrick and
I went to Terrapin to support the Logo we'd brought to near-product
readiness, Gary Drescher went to LCSI with the idea of writing a new
Logo based on the old LLOGO idea of parsing, but this time with
reparsing as the fix for the redefinition problem. Gary also wanted
to regularize the syntax some, for IF and so on, to make it more
Lisp-like and less English-like.
Margaret Minsky, Brian Silverman from Ottawa, Ed Hardebeck, and Steve
Hain went to LCSI, as did the late Greg Gargarian, who was at the time
Seymour's administrative assistant but who later obtained a PhD from
the MIT Media Lab. LCSI bought two Lisp Machines, Inc. machines from
Richard Greenblatt's company, and Gary and Ed wrote a 6502 assembler
in Lisp. Its big feature was that it would automatically assign Page
0 memory locations, which were in short supply and were necessary for
certain vital instructions. They finished it, and it took about two
hours per compilation.
Against all odds (Danny was laying 2-1), LCSI finished its Logo about
the same time that the NSF/MIT legal issues about Logo royalties got
resolved. The speed was about the same, within 10%. LCSI's Logo required
time for reparsing every procedure after each redefinition, so it ran
about 10% more slowly in interactive use, but about 10% faster if you didn't
change anything. With Seymour Papert supporting LCSI, they easily won
Steve Jobs's attention, and LCSI Logo became the offical Apple Logo.
Terrapin and LCSI competed vigorously for quite some. There was a great
atmosphere of fun, with both sets of us feeling we were doing something
we really liked, and also ``saving the world'' at the same time.
I contacted Virginia Grammar, and E. Paul Goldenberg, two people who
had written Logo papers on working with children, and with whose I was
particularly impressed. Terrapin paid them to write tutorials, and it
worked out great.
Krell competed on price. They sold the Logo disk exactly as received
from MIT, for $25. It had bugs in the garbage collector that caused
it to crash regularly, and other problems as well. I added MEMBER?
and related operators after going to Terrapin, and found and fixed
many bugs. When Consumer's Report magazine did an article on
software, they recommended Krell Logo because they said it was
obviously the same product for a better price, without even asking
Terrapin. From then on, I have assumed that Consumer's Report
magazine has done the same level of investigation of anything on which
they report.
About a year later, right after the IBM PC was announced, I found out about
the Commodore VIC-20. Terrapin's president Jock McClees (brother of one of the
founders) called Commodore on the phone and said, ``Hi, we're
Terrapina and we do Logo, and we want to do Logo for your VIC 20.''
Well, the VIC 20 had about 4K of memory, and I knew we couldn't do
Logo for it, but I figured we could work something out -- a memory
extension or something. It turned out that Commodore was in
development of a new product with 64K memory, and they wanted Logo.
So, Jock and I flew off to King of Prussia, PA, and did a dog-and-pony
show. At the time, Terrapin was a one-room walkup startup in scuzzy
Central Square, Cambridge, MA. It was terribly noisy, and I couldn't
hear myself think. We bought time from BBN on one of their DEC 20's for
cross-assembly, and I got an office in Harvard Square. It was perhaps
one of the most dismal programming jobs I'd ever had. There was no
window, and only a bare bulb, a bean bag chair, and a 1200-baud modem
connection over a Heathkit 24-line terminal I had to buy myself. I had
to convert Logo from 6502 code to 6809, and remove every reference
to the empty list [] because reading or writing that location made the
C64 disk go haywire! I studied secret C64 kernel listings printed in blue on
green paper (copy protection) to figure out which Page 0 locations we
could use.
Occasionally, I'd wander back into Central Square and talk to people
about the Apple II Logo on the phone. One day I ran into Charles
Frankston in Radio Shack, when we were both buying a tiny colored-pen
plotter than ran on adding machine paper. Frankston and Dan Bricklin
were the authors of Visicalc, for the Apple II. They were across the
street from Terrapin. I heard from them that Visicalc's former
marketing guy named Mitch had left and had started a company called
MicroFinance, in a basement around the corner. Patrick, Jock, and I
went over to ask for marketing advice -- it was that kind of a world
then. The marketing guy showed us a program he'd written in BASIC.
It took Visicalc data files and drew pie charts on the screen. The
pie charts were ovoid, because the pixels weren't square on the Apple.
We wrote the same program for him in Logo in about 3 minutes. He
laughed, and said he'd have us talk to his programmers, who were busy
coding his program into assembler. He finished the program, sold it
back to Visicalc for $1M in royalties. We were impressed. Next time
we went to see Mitch, the MicroFinance sign was down, and a new one
said ``Lotus.'' I often wish we'd spent more time listening instead
of showing him Logo.
By this time, Terrapin had hired Mark Eckenwiler, a Harvard student,
to pack boxes. It became clear he had other talents, and he edited
the new documentation for the C64.
Terrapin had moved from its one room to a former radio station studio
located in a publishing company building in Cambridge. It was pretty
quiet back in the studio where I worked, and I got a lot more done,
and finished C64 Logo quickly. (There's still this bug in it though,
where the same Page 0 location is assigned to two things, and after
some number of tail recursive calls to a function, something gets
overwritten and you get a weird error...) There were two big problems
with the location though: (1) It was next door to the city jail, and
they'd bring in drunks and they'd shout and scream all night and bang
on the bars. (2) The publishing company had an alarmed storage
basement, but they didn't know how to turn off the alarm, so whenever
they wanted books, they'd go down there, trip the alarm, and wait 20
minutes for it to stop ringing. Even my soundproof spot-recording
studio wasn't quiet enough to keep that noise out.
But, Terrapin didn't do too badly with the Commodore Logo. The C64
was the biggest selling machine of its time. 3,000,000 in the US and
5,000,000 worldwide, and over 150,000 copies of Logo sold for it.
In 1984, when the Macintosh came out, Patrick Sobalvarro and I
approached Terrapin with the idea of developing a C version of Logo.
We felt that since we would be moving on to other things, we could
provide them with a portable system, with its first target being the
Macintosh, and maybe the second being the IBM PC, if it ever became
important in the education market. Terrapin hired someone to do the
second version, but decided not to focus on the business-use PC, but
instead the new 68000-based Sinclar QX, Sir Clive's second export
computer after the Timex one. Unfortunately never left the dock, and
the programmer quit, and Terrapin never (to my knowledge) developed
a PC version of Logo (though, see below).
At the time, all Mac software was compiled on the Lisa in Pascal. We
bought a 68010 Unix system and cross-compiled. We ordered a Sun 2,
but it was backordered, so we bought a machine from another company,
long since defunct (I hope). We compiled and tested the portable version
on the Unix box, and cross compiled to the Mac.
Patrick Sobalvarro was in charge of the interpreter and garbage
collector, and I wrote all the Logo primitives, the Mac OS and turtle
graphics systems, and handled the cross-compilation. We had lots of
trouble -- system crashes, disk crashes, etc. that kept us out of
operation for months at a time. Once, when Terrapin threatened legal
action against the company because they couldn't provide us with a
working C compiler and debugger, they put their president on the phone
to say to Terrapin's president, ``Your guys are just bluffing you.
There's nothing wrong with our machine. Real programmers debug with
print statements.''
I finished the Mac Logo just as after 512K Macs and the "Hierarchical
File System" came out. It ran for ten without requiring
any upgrades, and Terrapin is still selling it.
In the meantime, LCSI had gotten the deal from Steve Jobs to do the
official Logo for the Macintosh. Eventually, Apple gave it back to
them, and told them to sell it.
There were other companies producing Logo in the interim years.
Researchers in Edinborough, Scotland used it for serious AI
programming for years, almost back to the BBN days.
A brilliant computer scientist named Jonathan Allen (sp?) developed
some wonderful versions of Logo with innovative ideas for computer
science and education. He made a series of versions for failed
computer companies: one for the Mattell computer which was withdrawn
from the market within weeks of its first sales, and I believe he did
a deal with Osborne just before they went bust, though that could be a
confabulation.
Allen also approached the late Gary Kildall of Digital Research, and
got him so fired up about Logo that he decided to ignore Allen and
write his own, in C. It was terrible! They called it Dr. Logo, and
it ignored years of research into Logo usability studies (fixed
vs. floating point errors, words/string confusion, etc.), and years of
work on speed. It was 10x slower than the Apple II Logo, when running
on a PC XT!
After Digital Research's failure with Logo, they tried to bluff
Terrapin into selling the company to them for a song. I managed to
keep it from happening, by refusing to accept the pitiful deal they
offered me, and DR went away. I doubt Terrapin would exist now if
they had merged with Digital Research.
Harvard Associates also developed a version of Logo, written in C, in
conjunction with one of the IBM PC Lisp companies, I believe. Harvard
Associates was run by a former Terrapin manager, among others, and
came out with one of the first PC versions of Logo.
I heard from Terrapin last week that they have entered into a joint
marketing arrangement with Harvard Associates, in a further
consolidation of the Logo market.
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...
Leigh.
Leigh L Klotz Jr
directed the Logo for the Apple II project at MIT, and Brian Harvey
directed a Boston Children's Museum project which developed a version
of Logo that has had a long life, finding its way into at least one of
the public domain versions of Logo now written in C.
Jim Muller
In the mid-70's, the National Science Foundation and Texas Instruments both
funded projects to port Logo from the DEC minicomputer...PDP-11 if memory
serves me correctly...to personal computers. The National Science Foundation
project led to MIT Logo being introduced in January of 1982 by both Terrapin
Inc. and Krell Software. The Krell Software version seems to have disappeared.
Terrapin has continued and recently joined forces with Harvard Associates (PC
Logo) to continue Logo development.
The Texas Instruments project was designed to complement the infamous TI-99/4
Home Computer with its unique (at the time) video processor that offered
Sprites. TI Logo was the first commercial Logo package...introduced at the
NCTM conference in St. Louis in April, 1981, by Seymour Papert.
1982 saw the flood gates open with various versions of Logo from Logo
Computer Systems, Inc. and other companies. Over the next two years...from
April 1981...approximately 24 versions of Logo were introduced for virtually
all personal computer. Terrapin Logo and Apple Logo were prominent on the
top 10 software seller lists during this period...as the Apple II spread
into the consumer and school marketplace.
During this period, several Logo groups were formed...but that's another story.
Regards...Jim Muller
--
Jim Muller
CIS Logo Forum
Leigh L Klotz Jr
From: "Jecel Mattos de Assumpcao Jr." <je...@lsi.usp.br>
Message-Id: <1995121819...@ofelia.lsi.usp.br>
To: kl...@adoc.xerox.com
Subject: Re: Early history (was: Getting LOGO)
Your message in comp.lang.logo about the history of the language
was great! Almost all of it was news to me. I don't know if the
Logo FAQ is still being updated, but this should be included in it.
One thing surprised me very much: you mentioned that the C64 used
a 6809 cpu. I always thought it was a 6502 machine, like the
VIC 20!
OOPS! You're correct. The C64 used a 6510, which was a modified 6502
made by MOS Technologies, owned by Commodore. The main difference was
the presence of a parallel I/O port at location 0 and 1. That's what
caused me so many problems in dealing with the empty list, since the
MIT Logo depended on those locations containing 0. To debug he C64
Logo, Commodore had MOS Technologies fabricate a special 6510 with an
extra pin which signalled whether the CPU was fetching instructions or
data from memory. They hooked a Nicolet-Paratronics logic analyzer to
the chip, and ran it with a BASIC program on a Commodore PET, usings
the IEEE-488 instrumentation bus!
I was confused about the 6809 because another thing I did with Logo
was help produce the first Logo in Japanese, on the Hitachi Basic
Master Mark IV, for Leona Publications, KK, in Tokyo, in 1983. It was
the first Logo to use Hiragana, the syllable-based writing system
which children learn first. But, that (and the more succesful
LCSI version for the Fujitsi F7) is another story...
Back in 1983, I designed a 6809 machine exclusively to run Logo. You
can see a picture of it at http://www.lsi.usp.br/~jecel/pegasus.html
We never did really finish it, unfortunately.
I'm impressed.
Once again, thanks for the memories ;-)
-- Jecel Mattos de Assumpcao Jr
Leigh.
Foster Schucker
CPM systems. There was an add on graphics board that would do the turtle
displays. They had added a number of extensions onto current Logos that
made it a very powerful language. I wrote a number of programs with it,
for file and list processing it was a great system.
I don't think it was ever ported to Intel-PC machines. I exchanged
emails with Ruth Davis about six years ago, she did not know of a (then)
current version.
I also have the book Thinking About [TLC] Logo by John R. Allen, Ruth E
Davis and John F. Johnson. (ISBN 0-03-64116-0). I think that it is the
greatest tutorial for Logo that I've ever seen.
Foster
Robert M. Matthews
: In 1984 I bought a copy of TLC Logo (From The LISP Company) that ran on
: CPM systems. [...] They had added a number of extensions onto current
: Logos that made it a very powerful language. [...] for file and list
: I don't think it was ever ported to Intel-PC machines. I exchanged
: emails with Ruth Davis about six years ago, she did not know of a (then)
: current version.
: I also have the book Thinking About [TLC] Logo by John R. Allen, Ruth E
: Davis and John F. Johnson. (ISBN 0-03-64116-0). I think that it is the
: greatest tutorial for Logo that I've ever seen.
I agree that this is a fascinating book. Unfortunately, it has been nothing
more than a book for me because I couldn't afford to buy an expensive
computer from the US to run it on (I live in Taiwan). However, I recently
bought a copy of MicroWorlds (which runs on the cheap 486 PC I have -
here in Taiwan, everybody is moving up to Pentiums) and I find that it
has some features which resemble TLC Logo, such as multiple turtles and
tiling. I haven't progressed far enough to decide if there are other
resemblances. Perhaps some wise reader could provide light?
Robert Matthews
matt...@transend.com.tw
--
* Why does a dead roach always have its legs sticking up? The legs curl up,
* making it unstable right-side-up, so it tips over. [Also, the legs make
* convenient little handles for angels to carry its wretched soul to heaven]
* {Thanks to cat...@delphi.com} Robert MATTHEWS matt...@transend.com.tw
Brian Harvey
>tiling. I haven't progressed far enough to decide if there are other
>resemblances.
TLC Logo is pretty profoundly different from most other dialects in that
it's closer to mainstream Lisp. For example, it eliminates the distinction
between commands and operations; every procedure outputs a value. It has
first-class procedures (the equivalent of LAMBDA in Lisp). It has
object-oriented extensions. All in all, it was way ahead of its time,
and perhaps that's why it didn't take over the world.
Robert M. Matthews
: TLC Logo is pretty profoundly different from most other dialects in that
: it's closer to mainstream Lisp. For example, it eliminates the distinction
: object-oriented extensions. All in all, it was way ahead of its time,
: and perhaps that's why it didn't take over the world.
Is there perhaps an emulator available that would permit running TLC Logo
on a PC DX-4 120? I would be willing to buy a copy of an emulator and the
language just so I could play with it. <Thinking about TLC Logo> is
indeed a fascinating book. Any sources out there?
Paul M. Wexelblat
>Path: network.com!msc.edu!news.sprintlink.net!rhythm.com!news.sprintlink.net!nntp.coast.net!lll-winken.llnl.gov!parc!news
>From: kl...@adoc.xerox.com (Leigh L Klotz Jr)
. .
> Date: Mon, 18 Dec 1995 11:41:22 -0800
> From: "Jecel Mattos de Assumpcao Jr." <je...@lsi.usp.br>
> Message-Id: <1995121819...@ofelia.lsi.usp.br>
> To: kl...@adoc.xerox.com
> Subject: Re: Early history (was: Getting LOGO)
>
> Your message in comp.lang.logo about the history of the language
> was great! Almost all of it was news to me. I don't know if the
> Logo FAQ is still being updated, but this should be included in it.
I'm sorry I missed the article on the history of Logo I'd appreciate it if someone
could point me to an archive site.
Anyhow, somew thoughts on some comments on this thread
Logo looks like lisp since it was originally written in Lisp (on the PDP-1 at BBN) (Dan Bobrow, I
think played a large part there; this was when Marvin Minsky was involved in the project, and before
Seymour came to MIT) The next implementation (the one I was involved with) was also
on a BBN PDP-1, but this was in assembly language. Wally Feurzeig, the inventor of Logo
changed the name from Ghost (the Lisp version) to Logo. I built the first turtle (along with much
code) Seymour provided most of the impetus for the turtle; display graphics were rare and expensive,
the first turtle was a mechanical floor/table crawler.
Much of this is in the FAQ, BTW [There was also a PDP-10 implementation (Mostly by Wally
Weiner - this was still all at BBN.]
More later if folks are really interested.
...wex
--
...wex
PaulWeiss
> Davis and John F. Johnson. (ISBN 0-03-64116-0).
A bit off the development of this thread, but is this the same John Allen
who wrote "Anatomy of Lisp", McGraw Hill, 1978?
--
Paul Weiss | Workstation TechTrans | Portland, OR
"Unix Workstation Engineering Training Specialists"
System Interface/TLI/Sockets/XDR/RPC/C/C++/Internals/Development
Methodology/Shell pgmg/SVR4/SunOS/MultiThread
enki...@gmail.com
> In article <4a9mvd$r...@agate.berkeley.edu> b...@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Brian Harvey) writes:
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.)
>
Thanks,
jv
Lars Brinkhoff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ
Lars Brinkhoff
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.
Lars Brinkhoff
> Maybe it would be possible to get the original MIT PDP-11 LOGO running.
Lars Brinkhoff
>> Maybe it would be possible to get the original MIT PDP-11 LOGO running.
>
> It's running now.
MIT Apple II Logo (direct ancestor of Terrapin Apple II Logo).