[HN Gopher] Byte Magazine Volume 07 Number 08 - Logo (1982)
___________________________________________________________________
Byte Magazine Volume 07 Number 08 - Logo (1982)
Author : susam
Score : 120 points
Date : 2021-09-21 10:13 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (archive.org)
| datavirtue wrote:
| Luckily my grandfather saved his Byte magazines and gave me the
| stack when I was about 12 yrs old (early 90s). I lived deep in
| the countryside and these were my only glimpse at the industry at
| the time and led to me seeking out other languages beside BASIC.
| ylee wrote:
| Learning Logo in elementary school is how I was introduced to the
| concept of recursion. I have a vivid memory of the moment I made
| the breakthrough in understanding in my head.
|
| 40 years later, I still want to giggle like a child when I find
| something in Emacs Lisp I can do more elegantly through
| recursion.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| I don't think I've ever seen the Microsoft logo on page 22.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I call it their Metallica logo. It was short-lived but I like
| it way better then the teeth one that came after
| taylodl wrote:
| I used Logo while taking Algebra II in high school. I remember
| seeing this issue of Byte at the time and I realized hey, I can
| plot functions! Our CS club had Logo for the Apple II machines
| they had and away I went! I learned very quickly not to plot
| _every single point_ , how to determine how much to plot based
| off of display resolution, and get an idea for what your _dx_
| should be. I also explored lots of polynomial graphs we 'd never
| get to see in class. It was fun!
| NKosmatos wrote:
| 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 :-)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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
| ebaustin wrote:
| I loved Byte magazine. I vaguely remember that cover, though I
| never worked with Logo.
|
| OT: This issue brought back some good memories as I saved most of
| my summer job pay and bought my first PC - a SuperBrain II, which
| is advertised on page 12. I mostly wrote programs on it using
| Turbo Pascal.
| CaliLonghair wrote:
| That SuperBrain ad caught my eye as well. For a certain
| generation of people in my extended social group, the
| SuperBrain looms large because one was used as the console for
| the BBS they used/met on in the mid 80's and early 90's.
|
| After the BBS went under, the SuperBrain was passed around
| between various users who wanted to hold onto that piece of
| shared history. Right before COVID I was able to return it to
| the original sysop who was shocked it was still around some 30
| years later.
| ta4873674773 wrote:
| 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.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I think I have that Byte issue out in the garage :)
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| 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!
| liotier wrote:
| I was eight years old when Logo taught me that the computer does
| what I tell it do to - no more, no less... Everything I learned
| ever since is just implementation details.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Well, except for those cosmic rays ;)
| [deleted]
| susam wrote:
| Indeed! I have had a very similar experience when I learnt Logo
| in 1992. I was nine years old then. I loved how we could just
| start the computer, insert a floppy disk, and start programming
| it immediately without jumping through too many hoops. It was
| simple, distraction-free, and fun!
|
| I have written about my experience learning Logo and the impact
| it has had on me here: https://susam.in/blog/fd-100.html . Logo
| introduced me to the joy of programming!
| noisy_boy wrote:
| 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...
| pjmlp wrote:
| Had UNIX been sold at the same price as VMS and other systems
| back in the day, without any kind of source code available,
| history would have taken another path.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| That was probably true back then. My understanding is that Unix
| wasn't ready for commercial production work until the late 80s
| at least.
| davidgay wrote:
| Sun launched in 1982, went public in 1986
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Microsystems). One might
| presume that its customers thought it ready for commercial
| production work by the mid 80s at least...
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Yes, they had a viable commercial Unix product from 1982
| until the release of Solaris in 1992. It all went downhill
| from there. ;)
| neha1989 wrote:
| LOGO was my first introduction to programming in 3rd grade back
| in 92-93 in Delhi/India.
| chakkepolja wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ido wrote:
| 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.
| bouvin wrote:
| 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.
| a-dub wrote:
| also the C users journal.
| phkahler wrote:
| Steve's history went on beyond Byte:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ciarcia
|
| His projects in Byte were better IMHO as it was usually just
| him doing some cool or impressive stuff. Sometimes he'd get
| some help, but he didn't have a regular staff back then.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I was getting ready to make this exact comment. Byte and Dr.
| Dobb's were both critical to me and my entry into computer
| science.
| einpoklum wrote:
| On page 14, you'll find Figure 3, suggesting that it is cheaper
| to employ robots than Humans from the US, West Germany, or Japan!
| $4.80 / hour gets you the finest robot labor apparently.
| wiz21c wrote:
| 500+ pages... Colossal !
| Uberphallus wrote:
| Of which more than half (of what I've skimmed through, at
| least) are ads. Makes FB at 1/4 ad content seem even
| reasonable.
| II2II wrote:
| The ads in a publication like Byte (or many of the other
| computer magazines of the day) were a different beast. Quite
| often, they were the only way to learn about new products and
| the products advertised were relevant to the audience of the
| magazine. It is a far cry from the mass market advertising
| found on Facebook (or television, or radio).
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Remember when instead of ads having urls or QR codes, there
| was a pre-addressed postcard "Reader Service Card" in the
| back of the magazine with numbers for each ad that you
| could get more information about, by circling the numbers
| and mailing in the card?
|
| p. 511: Reader Service
|
| Check out some of the cool company names on that page: Some
| of them are such exuberant techno-babble!
|
| BOB'S CHARTS. COMPUFUN. COMPUPRO/GODBOUT. COSMIC COMP ULTD.
| CYBERNETICS INC. DATAFACE. EXPOTEK. ELECTROLABS. GILTRONIX.
| JAMECO ELECTR (I LOVED their catalogs!). LEGEND INDUSTRIES.
| MACROTRONICS INC. MICRO DATA-TEK. MICRO-BAUD INC.
| MICROHOUSE. MICROMAIL. MICROSOFT. MICROTAX. MINI MICRO
| MART. MOUNTAIN VIEW PRESS. MUSYS CORP. NETRONICS. PEGASUS
| DATA SYS. PERCOM DATA. PI-TECH. PROTECTO ENTERPR. QUADRAM
| CORP. QUASAR DATA PROD INC. DATGO. RADIO SHACK CIV. RED
| BARON COMP PROD. S-100 INC. SCION CORP. SINCLAIR RESEARCH.
| STACKWORKS. SUBLOGIC. SUNTRONICS. SUPERSOFT. TECH-DATA.
| TELETEK. TELEVIDEO INC. TERMINALS TERRIFIC. TERRAPIN INC.
| THUNDERWARE. US ROBOTICS. VIDEX. VISICORP INC. VOTRAX. VR
| DATA. VYNET CORP. WINTEK CORP. XITEN SYSTEMS. XAVAX CORP.
| YORK-10. ZEPHYR INC. ZOBEX.
|
| Inquire No: [1..438] Page No: [1..511]
|
| To get further information on the products advertised in
| BYTE, fill out the reader service card with your name and
| address. Then circle the appropriate numbers for the
| advertisers you select from the list. Add an 18-cent stamp
| to the card, then drop it in the mail. Not only do you gain
| information, but our advertisers are encouraged to use the
| marketplace provided by BYTE. This helps us bring you a
| bigger BYTE. The index is provided as an additional service
| by the publisher, who assumes no liability for errors or
| omissions.
|
| https://twitter.com/tschak/status/1394000556419547136
| blackhaz wrote:
| Yep. The time when print magazines and ads were actually
| interesting.
| op00to wrote:
| They still are FASCINATING. People just trying anything.
| Personal testimonials, sexual imagery, crazy far out
| futuristic art, it's all there in the ads.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Right. They were ads for stuff you likely actually found
| interesting, not ads for reverse mortgages and dubious real
| estate investments.
|
| Computer Shopper, another (and much, much larger, in terms
| of page count) magazine of the era was essentially nothing
| _but_ ads. It had just enough editorial material to qualify
| it as a "magazine" under postal regulations (magazines had
| to pay less postage than pure advertisements). It sold like
| hotcakes.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Yep. I used to buy Computer Shopper issues _for_ the ads.
| They were one of the best ways to find out about new
| components becoming available, and - of course - you were
| always looking for the lowest price for memory, power
| supplies, cases, etc. This was back when building your
| own PC from parts was much more common than it is today.
|
| I kinda miss the "Computer Shopper era" TBH.
| namdnay wrote:
| Looking back at it today, the ads are so interesting ! So
| many different products/solutions out there
| grkvlt wrote:
| yeah, although sibling commenters are complaining about the
| type of adverts seen on today's platforms being different;
| namely that byte and computer shopper had ads that were
| 'useful' or 'interesting' by some definition, compared to
| youtube or facebook.
|
| i think this often reflects more on the viewer, and the type
| of content they access, than on the platform. depending on
| the videos i watch, along with some judicious approval or
| disapproval via the thumbs up/down buttons presented and
| skipping boring or irrelevant ads and vice-versa, i now am
| presented with much more appropriate and interesting or
| informative adverts for products and services i wouldn't have
| known existed and so on.
|
| there's a lot to be said for targeted advertising, whether
| through specific platforms or media (such as only advertising
| in byte magazine and therefore reaching a specific audience
| of tech-literates) or via big data style ad platforms such as
| adsense on youtube.
| LVB wrote:
| Whenever I browse scans of old magazines like this I find the
| ads have a real historical value. Many are a rich snapshot:
| the state of the art (for that publication's audience),
| pricing, language/vernacular, style, and even hints at how
| business was done (eg phone numbers, PO boxes, SASEs,
| shipping costs, etc.) I'm not quite so optimistic about the
| long term value of the hyper personalized Taboola chum box :/
| shimonabi wrote:
| Wow. I didn't know Microsoft had a "metal" company logo.
| dr_zoidberg wrote:
| A bit off topic... When I was a child, we had at home a "big
| yellow book" (mind you, I was 4 or 5 at the time, so maybe not
| that big) that taught about how computers worked in the first
| part and in the second part had Logo and BASIC games you could
| type into your PC.
|
| Since it was a book for children, it was full of illustrations
| but it went into some details (or maybe I'm adding stuff into it
| in retrospect). The main protagonists were a boy and a girl, with
| a pet (maybe a dog?). I think I remember the boy having some kind
| of curly/fluffy hair. I remember the eyes of the characters were
| distinctive, but can't really recall _how_.
|
| Any idea or pointers about finding this book? I don't remember
| anything about the title, author, publisher, etc.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Was it "BASIC COMPUTER GAMES" from Creative Computing? I loved
| that book! (Probably not, from your description, but it was
| very big and very yellow and had a lot of games you could type
| in.)
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/624341.Basic_Computer...
|
| https://ia902805.us.archive.org/1/items/basic-computer-games...
| dr_zoidberg wrote:
| It's not. The drawings were a bit more cartoony with "big
| heads and small bodies". The book also had a lot of Logo,
| which we couldn't really use because our computer back then
| only had a BASIC interpreter.
|
| Thanks for the suggetion though :)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I got a copy of that issue at the antique mall for $1 a few weeks
| ago.
| magoghm wrote:
| I recently discovered that the most popular tool used by
| scientists who do research using agent based modeling is based on
| Logo: https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/
| susam wrote:
| 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's #logo channel:
| https://app.element.io/#/room/#logo:libera.chat
| rzzzt wrote:
| At school, we used a Logo implementation that had a shape
| editor that you could jump into with a keyboard combination.
| You could edit 32x32(?) pixel images, and it came pre-populated
| with the default turtle, some animation phases of a stick
| figure, a house, heads, etc. IIRC, SHAPE <n> changed the turtle
| image to the given shape, and you could control 8-ish
| independent turtles. It ran on MS-DOS systems. Does anyone know
| which one it might be?
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| 6. NetLogo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetLogo &
| https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/
| riedel wrote:
| FMS Logo released version 8.2 yesterday
|
| https://sourceforge.net/projects/fmslogo/
|
| Logo was also the programming language I used at school.
| Funnily they translated it to German and because the German
| translation for turtle (Schildkrote) spells too long they
| translated it to Igel (hedgehog). I remember the fun
| programming fractals using turtle graphics
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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
| larsbrinkhoff wrote:
| Your LLOGO copy was for an older version of Maclisp, but
| eventually we (Eric and I) managed to port it over to New IO.
| It works fine and displays on an emulated Knight TV. (Itself
| a tour de force in emulation: the TV PDP-11 code runs on an
| emulator sharing its Unibus with the PDP-10 emulator.)
|
| We also have an early PDP-11 Logo, an even earlier BBN PDP-10
| Logo, and a later Apple II Logo (not the Terrapin version). I
| also wrote an emulator for the General Turtle 2500 computer
| slash terminal.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Do you have the specs for the infamous military Terrapin
| Snapping Turtle proposed to the Department of Defense?
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1056602.1056608
|
| https://donhopkins.com/home/TurtlesAndDefense.pdf
|
| >TURTLES AND DEFENSE
|
| >Introduction
|
| >At Terrapin, we feel that our two main products, the
| Terrapin Turtle (r), and the Terrapin Logo Language for the
| Apple II, bring together the fields of robotics and AI to
| provide hours of entertainment for the whole family. We are
| sure that an enlightened application of our products can
| uniquely impact the electronic battlefield of the future.
| [...]
|
| >Guidance
|
| >The Terrapin Turtle (r), like many missile systems in use
| today, is wire-guided. It has the wire-guided missile's
| robustness with respect to ECM, and, unlike beam-riding
| missiles, or most active-homing systems, it has no radar
| signature to invite enemy missiles to home in on it or its
| launch platform. However, the Turtle does not suffer from
| that bugaboo of wire-guided missiles, i.e., the lack of a
| fire-and-forget capability.
|
| >Often ground troops are reluctant to use wire-guided
| antitank weapons because of the need for line-of-sight
| contact with the target until interception is accomplished.
| The Turtle requires no such human guidance; once the
| computer controlling it has been programmed, the Turtle
| performs its mission without the need of human
| intervention. Ground troops are left free to scramble for
| cover. [...]
|
| >Because the Terrapin Turtle (r) is computer-controlled,
| military data processing technicians can write arbitrarily
| baroque programs that will cause it to do pretty much
| unpredictable things. Even if an enemy had access to the
| programs that guided a Turtle Task Team (r) , it is quite
| likely that they would find them impossible to understand,
| especially if they were written in ADA. In addition, with
| judicious use of the Turtle's touch sensors, one could,
| theoretically, program a large group of turtles to simulate
| Brownian motion. The enemy would hardly attempt to predict
| the paths of some 10,000 turtles bumping into each other
| more or less randomly on their way to performing their
| mission. Furthermore, we believe that the spectacle would
| have a demoralizing effect on enemy ground troops. [...]
|
| >Munitions
|
| >The Terrapin Turtle (r) does not currently incorporate any
| munitions, but even civilian versions have a downward-
| defense capability. The Turtle can be programmed to attempt
| to run over enemy forces on recognizing them, and by
| raising and lowering its pen at about 10 cycles per second,
| puncture them to death.
|
| >Turtles can easily be programmed to push objects in a
| preferred direction. Given this capability, one can easily
| envision a Turtle discreetly nudging a hand grenade into an
| enemy camp, and then accelerating quickly away. With the
| development of ever smaller fission devices, it does not
| seem unlikely that the Turtle could be used for delivery of
| tactical nuclear weapons. [...]
| larsbrinkhoff wrote:
| Ha ha! No, I didn't.
| larsbrinkhoff wrote:
| Broken link? Nothing was taken down, but the code was updated
| to a newer version.
|
| Here's a new link for you: Logo in space. It uses Minsky's
| circle algorithm for trigonometry.
| https://www.playfulinvention.com/portfolio/crickets-in-
| space...
| empressplay wrote:
| also turtleSpaces, a modern web- and app-based 3D Logo
| https://turtlespaces.org
| zephyrfalcon wrote:
| To add to that, Brian Harvey's homepage has three books about
| Logo for free: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/#csls
| robomartin wrote:
| I remember this issue. I used to read Byte magazine cover-to-
| cover, multiple times per issue. I also built many of the
| circuits they published and learned a tremendous amount from both
| hardware and coding articles. It's hard for people today to
| imagine a monthly publication with over 500 pages, yet that's
| what Byte became. It was fantastic. I still have a box full of
| articles I clipped before discarding my collection (at some point
| you have to let go).
|
| The other thing that's amazing to me --unrelated to Byte-- is how
| much of current AI/machine-learning is stuff that was being done
| as far back as thirty years ago. I have a four volume set on AI
| dating back to that era. Most of the neural network stuff we see
| as magical tools today exists in those books. The difference is
| that we now have machines with massive storage, working memory
| and speed. In some ways we haven't really gone very far at all, a
| perspective lost to those who don't have the benefit of history.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Byte was great, but Creative Computing and Dr. Dobb's Journal
| were the ones I REALLY enjoyed and looked forward to every
| month.
| robomartin wrote:
| Yes, Dr. Dobb's was the other one I consumed voraciously,
| along with Popular Electronics. I think my only other
| subscription was to MIT's Journal of Artificial Intelligence
| and Robotics (which was available with companion VHS tapes
| showing off the research).
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| I was an irregular reader of Byte but I did enjoy it.
| Particularly, the front cover artwork was usually unique and
| interesting and, silly as it sound, the ads. I pour through
| them every time I got a copy. Its a real hoot to look at them
| today.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar was one of the best parts of Byte
| magazine, the first thing I read when I got a new issue. There
| were always a lot of hardware hacking projects in the TRS-80
| Color Computer oriented Rainbow magazine, I learned a lot from
| those although I was always a bit weary of accidentally
| destroying a relatively expensive piece of hardware with a bad
| circuit.
|
| The artwork is the biggest thing I miss from the early computer
| magazines. Really amazing stuff that reminded me of all the
| sci-fi magazines from the fifties. Nothing like that today.
| op00to wrote:
| Was this magazine really 500 pages thick?
| kloch wrote:
| I think 1980-1983 was the peak for Byte
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I have a copy of that issue and what stands out about it is the
| indifference that the regular contributors show to Logo.
|
| Steve Ciarcia for instance, has an article about a graphics
| controller from Texas Instruments which has way too many sprites
| for logo (just need one for the turtle.) He codes with a
| soldering iron, struggles with assembly language, probably
| doesn't know BASIC and could care less about Logo.
| buescher wrote:
| Oh wow. I built that circuit, on perfboard, with wire-wrap,
| using parts from a TI-99/4A, some summer in the late eighties.
| I had intended to drive it from the joystick ports of an Atari
| 800XL. I struggled to get it working, went back to school, and
| it may still be sitting in a box at my parent's house. If I
| could find it it would be a hoot to bring up with a modern
| microcontroller.
| chris_st wrote:
| The book "Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams -- Explorations in
| massively parallel microworlds" [0] describes StarLogo, which was
| a massively parallel version of Logo. In it you could create,
| say, 1000 turtles in the center of the screen, and the puzzle
| was, when you told them all "forward 100", what shape would it
| draw? The answer was a circle, since they all start with a random
| heading.
|
| This was initially implemented on a Connection Machine. Very
| interesting book, highly recommended.
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/Turtles-Termites-Traffic-Jams-
| Explora...
| the-dude wrote:
| We were taught Logo in the first year in highschool ( 1986 ) on a
| network of BBC B's.
|
| Thanks awesome school!
| darkwater wrote:
| Probably unrelated but I really just love archive.org efforts to
| preserve knowledge, even if trivial, mundane or pop. The other
| day I was in nostalgia mode and wanted to play again Secret of
| Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2 and they are perfectly
| available on archive.org in the abandonware section, comfortably
| packed in a zip file with even copy protection removed (this
| applies to MI2, MI1 didn't have any).
| mseepgood wrote:
| > MI1 didn't have any
|
| It did. I still have my Dial-A-Pirate wheel.
| desi_ninja wrote:
| the remastered ones are in pc and xbox platforms
| _bax wrote:
| LOGO! How nice was the for loop!
| mmargerum wrote:
| Love the old Ad. Bill Cosby hocking calculators in the one.
| teddyh wrote:
| ITYM "hawking".
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Logo Adventure for C64 Terrapin Logo (1983):
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrapi...
|
| >When I was 17, Terrapin published my first commercial code on
| their C64 Logo utilities disk: a Logo Adventure program, a simple
| non-graphical game that showed off Logo's list processing and
| functional programming capabilities.
|
| >I love Terrapin Logo! I got away with not having to write a
| parser, by simply using the Logo top-level read-eval-print loop
| as the parser, and defining Logo words like LOOK, N, S, E, W,
| TAKE, EXAMINE, etc. So it's really easy to cheat by examining and
| modifying the state of the world, but that helps you learn Logo!
| [...]
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Page 38 has an article about The Last One, a program generator
| that was supposed to make all other programs obsolete.
|
| A bit like the low code stuff we are seeing today.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)
| aasasd wrote:
| It seems that this upload gets the pages wrong, but there's a
| rescan that is right.
|
| Compare: https://archive.org/details/byte-
| magazine-1982-08/page/n303/... and
| https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-08-rescan/pag...
|
| https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-08/page/n349/...
| and https://archive.org/details/byte-
| magazine-1982-08-rescan/pag...
|
| https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-08/page/n363/...
| and https://archive.org/details/byte-
| magazine-1982-08-rescan/pag...
|
| https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-08/page/n231/...
| and https://archive.org/details/byte-
| magazine-1982-08-rescan/pag...
| armandososa wrote:
| A story about Logo:
|
| Thirty years ago, driven by poverty and lack of opportunities, me
| and my family illegally crossed the border from Tijuana into San
| Diego. We had some friends in Pasadena who received us in a spare
| bedroom while we settled. Since I was eleven years old, I was
| enrolled in the sixth grade of the local elementary school.
|
| The teacher (Ms Castro) was incredibly gracious with this tiny
| Mexican who didn't speak a word of english. I was only required
| to participate in math and art clases (Also, it seemed like
| Mexican fifth grade math was more advanced than California's so I
| looked like a genius ;)) and on some ESL courses the school
| offered while skipping classed that required English.
|
| Anyway, there was this one computer in ms Castro's classroom. It
| was an Apple machine, but I could not tell you which one because
| this was the first computer I ever touched. So the teacher
| instructed some other hispanic kid to show me how to turn the
| computer on and "play" with this toy program called Logo so I
| have something to do while the others kids are in class. I spent
| hours and hours each day with this thing; fast forward a couple
| months and I was not only drawing but writing programs that
| produced musical animations to the astonishments of the entire
| class.
|
| It was a great experience --pretty much the only positive
| experience we had while in the US--. Five months later we had to
| get back, and I wouldn't have access to a personal computer for
| another 9 years. I always wondered what would've happened if we
| stayed.
|
| Anyway, Logo was my introduction to computing and helped my keep
| my sanity during my five months as an illegal immigrant.
| edw519 wrote:
| "I always wondered what would've happened if..."
|
| Me too. But I'm trying to quit.
| rafaelturk wrote:
| Impressive how many `vendors` were out there, far more diverse
| than today.
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