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Comment by MicahKV | Hacker News Reader

Wow, what a blast from the past. My introduction to programming was on an old Apple II with BASIC and LOGO. I was in the 6th grade at the time, and never did anything as complex as looping to draw spirals - I basically used LOGO like an etch-a-sketch.

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Me too. I really liked Logo. I worked as "child volunteer" at and art museums "festival of the future" making logo spirographs for interested visitors. It was the early 80s and the apple ][+ 's 7 colors (2 white and 2 black..) was pretty bad compared till today, but we didn't care because not much was better.

Basic was built in so I ended up going back to that. I learned logo, pascal and basic, but being built in and not having access to pascal at home made my choice.

I did return to logo in high school on macs for some neat fractal and equation graphing programs.

Hey! Hey! Stop bad-mouthing the Apple II's graphics capabilities. I'll have you know the computer has not 7 but 8 high-resolution colors (of which two are white and two are black, but who cares about being a little wasteful when you have so many colors to choose from?).

Brings back old memories of the Beagle Bros and Winfall (Windfall?) magazines and things.

I recall seeing LOGO and turtles in some of the magazines but never got the chance to try em out. Back then I used to try and just type out snippets of what in hindsight was just pseudo-code from all sorts of places hoping it worked, then attempted to enter all the machine code for an assembler that came in a big red binder (didn't work, despite checksums, but you also had to write the 'editor' so I stuffed that up I suspect).

I started on the Apple II with BASIC. Then, some computer teacher convinced my parents that I should be learning LOGO instead and gave me lessons. After spending some time on it, I found it sufficiently frustrating that I actually gave up and went back to BASIC.

I don't recall exactly that it was that I didn't like about LOGO back then. One thing probably was that I needed to first boot up into a "special environment" to run my code, and thus it didn't feel like I was writing a real program for the machine. Another might have been the emphasis on moving a turtle around, versus actually doing anything with text.

Alan Kay was quite inspired by a groundbreaking game series called "Thinkin' Things," which had a visual blocks programming language for controlling and drawing colorful patterns with marching bands, football players, and cheerleaders: "Let's build a halftime show"!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCFNUc10Vu8&feature=youtu.be...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423719

http://squeak-dev.squeakfoundation.narkive.com/7ZN0H3vt/etoy...

>Alan Kay on "Etoys, Alice and tile programming": "This particular strand starting with one of the projects I saw in the CDROM "Thinking Things" (I think it was the 3rd in the set). This project was basically about being able to march around a football field and the multiple marchers were controlled by a very simple tile based programming system. Also, a grad student from a number of years ago, Mike Travers, did a really excellent thesis at MIT about enduser programming of autonomous agents -- the system was called AGAR -- and many of these ideas were used in the Vivarium project at Apple 15 years ago. The thesis version of AGAR used DnD tiles to make programs in Mike's very powerful system."

I did the same in grade 7 on an Apple that was shared between two classrooms, and almost never used. I probably used it for an hour that year doing different diagrams in LOGO. Never used any of the conditionals or list processing features of the language though. For someone into computers at that age who had tinkered with BASIC, it was unforgettable.

The Apple in my classroom was also never used for the most part. And with no hard drive and no spare floppy disks, I couldn't save any of my work anyway which made it hard to learn past a very basic level. But it planted the seed, and allowed me to hit the ground running with QBasic :)

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