Name: LOGO for the Apple II
ISBN: 9780262510691

DonHopkinsSep 2021

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 It's a fascinating historical document, 12,480 lines of beautiful practical lisp code, defining where the rubber meets the road, with drivers for hardware like pots, plotters, robotic turtles, TV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?

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

thread

taylodlSep 2021

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!

thread

DonHopkinsMay 2020

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?

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/blob/a5694acbf9b6185a36d18d226...

>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

thread

klotzMay 2020

Thank you Don! I was going to comment that I wrote a 6502 assembler in Logo for the Apple II and the C64 and it shipped with it and it was documented how to write in assembler. I was hoping to hear some kid learned 6502 assembler from it. That counts you out since you already knew 6502 assembler.

thread

jrd259Oct 2018

Note there were two versions of Logo for the Apple II. The other was developed by Logo Computer Systems Inc. (I was one of the staff). Our version was written first in Lisp (on Lisp Machines) then manually compiled to assembler. The Lisp development environment included a full 6502 emulator, allowing the developers to execute Logo either at the Lisp level (fast) or to drop down into the instruction level (slow). The emulator also emulated the Apple II's graphics.

thread

Lord_NightmareOct 2018

Before today, was this version of MIT Logo for the Apple II EVER released?

I'm asking because of reaperducer's comment from just a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18086566

thread