[GTALUG] One of the First Computer TV shows from the 80s.

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Ian Garmaise <ian.g at phorixsol.com>

| || When I was at Logo Computer Systems in Montreal,

| They are still in business, focusing mostly on Microworlds.

Good!

I was very impressed by the outright competence they displayed.

What bothers me is that such competence was not enough to get world 
dominance.

Kind of like the Logo project in general.  There are so many things
right about Logo and yet is has kind of disappeared.

- The Consutructivist foundation of the project is a compelling idea.

- the fact that there was actually a well thought out philosophical
  underpinning ought to have made a big difference.

- there was a lot of supporting literature.  For example, Brian
  Harvey's books (for the technically inclined).  But lots of
  pedagogical material too.  And lots of gateway documentation.

- the beautiful simplicity and power of the language

- the brilliant minds behind it (eg. MIT and BBN).

- the turtle!  Great in so many ways.

- The austerity might have been a problem but Microworlds removed that block.

- logo implementations widely available.  For example, Brian Harvey's
  UCBlogo is open source and runs on Linux (and Windows, and ...)

| Other major MIT figure was Papert's student, Brian Silverman, VP R&D,
| with whom I'm still good friends.

That's who I worked with.  Very impressive.

| All of the 6502, 8088, Z80 (MSX) versions were written in assembly
| language using our
| own custom tools running on CADR Lisp machines (which I maintained).

Wow.  I didn't know that anything practical had been done with lisp
machines.  I also didn't know that anyone without deep corporate
pockets bought them.  They seemed a part of the first AI boom/crash.

| | They manage to implement a very nice logo on several 8-bit machines.
| |  We had a Logo cartridge for our Atari 800xl.  But they did apple and
| |  (duh) c64 too.
| 
| |  Their logo on the Atari 800xl was much nicer than the Digital Research
| | logo on the Atari ST (a much more powerful machine).
| 
| I don't believe we had anything to do with Atari ST Logo, although we
| did other work for DR.

I don't think LCS did the DR Logo -- it was pretty crude compared to
the 8-bit Atari Logo.

|  Atari 800 Logo was an amazing achievement
| given the constraints,
| as was C-64 Logo (sprites were a killer on that one according to a
| developer I spoke to).

Yeah.  I don't even know what the memory requirement was but you could
not use more than 48k of RAM on the Atari 800 (the system itself was
in a ROM cartridge, possibly bank-switched).  That's fairly tight for
logo -- assembly code would seem mandatory on those
horrible-for-compilers 8-bit architectures.

| We also created Lego Logo, the forerunner of some more recent Lego products.

Yeah.  My kids got to play with it in school.  It takes resources that
few schools have (i.e. a lot of support for the kids using it).