December 10, 2000

5:56 PM

I was doing some research for a (since abandoned) project, and came across a freeware version of logo for windows. After a little more digging I came up with a palm version. So, how many of you hip web kids started out with the tiny triangular turtle?
posted by alan (22 comments total)

I did. but I aint no hip web kid!
posted by cell divide at 6:02 PM on December 10, 2000

I went from BASIC to LOGO for a summer class. I remember thinking that LOGO sucked. As I recall, it was pretty much good for drawing basic line art pictures.

The other day I was thinking back to sixth grade when we had our first Bell & Howell Apple II Plus. It was black and beautiful.

We had an assignment to take a piece of graph paper and draw a picture using 16 colors. Then we had to right, by hand, the complete BASIC code that it would take to draw it on the screen using VLIGN and HLIGN commands (I think I have that right anyway).

It would take forever just to complete the simplest image but it was the coolest thing.
posted by Brilliantcrank at 6:25 PM on December 10, 2000

LOGO plus young elementary school kids plus informal instruction plus no reference materials was a recipe for some strange experiments. For example, animation by repeatedly changing the image for the turtle. Also, we "discovered" delay loops by turning drawing off and then sending the turtle forward huge distances -- which, in hindsight, says something about the LOGO implementation we were using.
posted by grimmelm at 7:05 PM on December 10, 2000

I started programming a simple version of logo for a model 100 portable a loooooong time ago.

It's fate was to get deleted or dumped to tape (I can't really remember now), but the computer itself lives on as *the* shining paragon of real portability and ruggedness.
posted by Kikkoman at 8:23 PM on December 10, 2000

In 6th grade we had an extracurricular logo class, and we discovered the fun that could be had by writing obscene things in the code -- the "user friendly" error message that would pop up with a bad command line was, "I don't know how to _______."

Yeah. huh huhuhuhuh.

Crayzee 10-year-olds....
posted by mimi at 8:30 PM on December 10, 2000

i'm no hip web kid, but i used LOGO when i was in elementary school. did anyone else do lego logo, where you programmed logo to make lego cars move and lights in lego houses turn off and on?

it was rad.
posted by sugarfish at 8:36 PM on December 10, 2000

Not too hip, but I remember using LOGO in elementry school. Despite 2 or 3 years of LOGO I don't recall ever going beyond simple shapes - and I *hated* the damn thing with a burning passion. If not for GUI I still would.
posted by fujikosmurf at 8:49 PM on December 10, 2000

LOGO was my first real programming language, back in the 6th or 7th grade, on an Apple IIe with a monochrome green monitor. I spent *hours* after school hacking together programs with LOGO. The only one I remember -- and the one I spent the most time on -- would ask you to type something, and then draw it out on the screen in big letters. I actually still have an Apple IIe and a monochrome green monitor, with a copy of LOGO...sadly, it just collects dust.

However, I also have a Palm computer (Visor Deluxe) and a keyboard for it. Maybe I'll get back into LOGO programming. Sure, its usefulness is limited, but it's fun.
posted by CrayDrygu at 10:29 PM on December 10, 2000

I recently got some acoustic couplers for my M100. Woo!
posted by gluechunk at 10:58 PM on December 10, 2000

In second grade, I used the ASCII BASIC on a Commodore Pet to make simple rocketship animations scroll by (my first infinite loop!). In fourth grade, I "moved up" to LOGO, only to make some more silly art. (I also played a beautiful and entrancing puzzle game called Rocky's Boots, which I later discovered was a simple digital-logic simulator.)

But my crowning (and final) LOGO achievement was in 5th or 6th grade, when on my family's Atari 520ST (with its crude GEM environment) I used Atari Logo to create a very simple password-protection system. Man, I was proud of that.

Then I discovered HyperCard ...
posted by dsandler at 10:59 PM on December 10, 2000

i used logo in elementary school and later logo with the lego robots... they said it was a programming language featuring recursion, but i only remember it as a complicated way to draw lines

FG 10
BG 5

i dont even remember anymore
posted by cmicali at 11:48 PM on December 10, 2000

I loved LOGO. Oh dear, yes. So much so I wrote a webpage about it.

Oh, and The Logo Foundation - someone's having a phallic day.
posted by holloway at 12:03 AM on December 11, 2000

LOGO is loosely derived from LISP and shares many of that language's list-processing functionality. Turtle graphics are really just the surface... sad that most courses never take kids beyond that.
posted by kindall at 12:29 AM on December 11, 2000

It's ten years ago that we had an IBM-sponsored 'computer bus' at our school every other week, in which we as 11-years-olds were taught the simle basics of text editing, databases and LOGO.

The best thing I remember about LOGO were the error messages -- something like:
"Hmmm 150000 steps. Can't do that: it's an evil number" :-)
posted by willem at 3:50 AM on December 11, 2000

I never had the opportunity to use LOGO. I taught myself BASIC and then assembly language when I was 13. After assembly language, I couldn't bear to work in BASIC. I can't imagine what LOGO would've been like at that point.

In college, I picked up a book on LOGO to investigate it as a target language to implement just for fun. When I found out about its LISP roots, I ran for the hills. I'd already implemented a LISPy language, and once was enough, thanks.
posted by plinth at 6:21 AM on December 11, 2000

Lego? Logo and Lego? Damn, now I feel like a deprived child. Although, in 7th grade we got to play around with the actual turtle robot. I remember being less than impressed as its pens continually jammed.

Rocky's Boots was another young favorite. I was so proud when I made the automatic alligator basher on level 3. Looks like you can play Rocky with an emulator if you wanted to.
posted by alan at 7:25 AM on December 11, 2000

God. 5th grade flashbacks. A dimly-lit computer lab with the small white triangle leaving his little trail about my green screen. Cries of "Look, I made a house!" bounced about the room.

Thanks for the memories. I think that was when I realized I liked working with these damned things.
posted by evixir at 7:27 AM on December 11, 2000

Yikes! Logo!! I remember running logo on my Atari 130 XE and being mostly underwhelmed. Shows how "hip" I am. I liked BASIC a lot more because I had no real interest in drawing anything.
posted by donkeymon at 8:04 AM on December 11, 2000

Logo! For a kid with a dream, spotty electricity and an old Apple II, (Original, no letters to follow) living in Sri Lanka, Logo kicked butt. Like evixir, Logo was what made me realise that computers were fun -- and that they weren't exclusively boys' toys. Yay for Logo.
posted by Dreama at 9:29 AM on December 11, 2000

It should be remembered that Logo was explicitly designed, like Pascal, as a teaching language. The fact that they were adapted for any other purpose is entirely the fault of the implementors. Logo, in particular, is a brilliant opening for elementary-school-aged kids into programming concepts. Is it perfect? Course not. But I still remember fondly the spirograph programs I experimented with -- and can't, to this day, think of a language that would be easier in which to do them.
posted by dhartung at 4:00 PM on December 11, 2000

For our HND computing project my friends and I decided to write an implementation of LOGO for the Amiga. We got it finished and received a distinction.
What did I do?
I wrote the manual.
Personally I learnt to program with BASIC first but I didn't really learn much until I started messing around with E (the stupidly named and obscure but cool programming language rather than the drug). Hence the fact that I wrote the manual.

Lee Taylor.
Stewart Ponsford.
Dave Marsh.
If only I knew where these guys where now so that I could thank them for my only distinction.
posted by davidgentle at 8:00 PM on December 11, 2000