Byte Magazine Volume 07 Number 08 – Logo (1982) | Hacker News Reader

Byte Magazine Volume 07 Number 08 – Logo (1982)

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124 pointssusam84 comments

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.

"I always wondered what would've happened if..."

Me too. But I'm trying to quit.

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

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

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.

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 ®, 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 ®, 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 ® 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 ® , 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 ® 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. [...]

Ha ha! No, I didn't.

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...

To add to that, Brian Harvey's homepage has three books about Logo for free: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/#csls

6. NetLogo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetLogo & https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

also turtleSpaces, a modern web- and app-based 3D Logo https://turtlespaces.org

At school, we used a Logo implementation that had a shape editor that you could jump into with a keyboard combination. You could edit 32×32(?) 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?

Found it, it was LCSI's LogoWriter.

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 (Schildkröte) spells too long they translated it to Igel (hedgehog). I remember the fun programming fractals using turtle graphics

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.

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.

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.

also the C users journal.

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.

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!

Well, except for those cosmic rays ;)

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.

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.

Byte was great, but Creative Computing and Dr. Dobb's Journal were the ones I REALLY enjoyed and looked forward to every month.

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).

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.

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).

> MI1 didn't have any

It did. I still have my Dial-A-Pirate wheel.

You are totally right, I completely forgot about it (well I had a photocopy of it when I was a kid...)

the remastered ones are in pc and xbox platforms

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...

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.

That was probably true back then. My understanding is that Unix wasn't ready for commercial production work until the late 80s at least.

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...

Yes, they had a viable commercial Unix product from 1982 until the release of Solaris in 1992. It all went downhill from there. ;)

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.

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...

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 :)

A "big yellow book" I had / still have with a boy and a girl - and lot of pictures - is this one (it's in Russian, though, you may had different one):

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads....

French original book:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/122322._quoi_r_vent_les_...

Does it look familiar?

No, but thanks for the suggestion. I should probably just draw the characters as best I could and head over to reddit or something.

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...

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.

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.

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)

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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! [...]

LOGO was my first introduction to programming in 3rd grade back in 92-93 in Delhi/India.

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.

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.

I got a copy of that issue at the antique mall for $1 a few weeks ago.

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!

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 :-)

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

500+ pages... Colossal !

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.

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).

Yep. The time when print magazines and ads were actually interesting.

They still are FASCINATING. People just trying anything. Personal testimonials, sexual imagery, crazy far out futuristic art, it's all there in the ads.

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.

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.

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

Looking back at it today, the ads are so interesting ! So many different products/solutions out there

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 :/

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.

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/

We were taught Logo in the first year in highschool ( 1986 ) on a network of BBC B's.

Thanks awesome school!

LOGO! How nice was the for loop!

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.

I think I have that Byte issue out in the garage :)

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!

Impressive how many `vendors` were out there, far more diverse than today.

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.

I don't think I've ever seen the Microsoft logo on page 22.

I call it their Metallica logo. It was short-lived but I like it way better then the teeth one that came after

Wow. I didn't know Microsoft had a "metal" company logo.

Love the old Ad. Bill Cosby hocking calculators in the one.

ITYM “hawking”.

Thank you

Was this magazine really 500 pages thick?

I think 1980-1983 was the peak for Byte

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