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Comment by lioeters | Hacker News Reader

Lovely how the title and author names line up.

  LOGO MANUAL
      by
  Hal Abelson
  Nat Goodman
  Lee Rudolph

As to the contents, it's impressive how advanced LOGO was for the time. In addition to controlling robot turtles, it could output to a display, plotter, and "music box".

It reminds me, one of the earliest software I wrote was a kind of mini-LOGO that controlled (via RS232 connection) a robot turtle that a friend built, in high school. I suppose that was in the 1990s, and if I remember correctly I wrote it in Turbo C, around when OOP and C++ were starting to get popular (?). And the funny thing is, a big part of my work these days is developing a domain-specific language, not too different from LOGO or BASIC, designed for end-user programming.

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In the 1980s there was also LEGO/LOGO, a programmable interface to a line of Technic products, plus an expansion card and breakout box for the Apple II to wire it all up.

There were motors, lights, and sensors you could program. One project I remember was build a car with a light sensor on the front, and then write a control loop that uses the sensor to make the car follow a line on the floor.

Here’s a blog post about someone exploring the tech:

http://lukazi.blogspot.com/2014/07/lego-legos-first-programm...

That looks like a lot of fun. The green display of the Apple II brings back memories. Looking at the pictures of LEGO parts and electronics, I see that the spirit lives on this day - as I turn my head to my box of ESP32s, Raspberry Pi, and various microcontrollers, sensors, relays. It makes me realize the continuity of history, and how I've managed to play from childhood until now.

What is the language you're working on now?

https://wordpress.org/plugins/tangible-loops-and-logic/

music box? could u elaborate?

They call it "tone generators" in the intro.

> 14. MUSIC BOX

> LOGO has primitives which supply output for the music box. A LOGO user can specify parts for up to 4 simultaneous voices, each voice having a range of five chromatic octaves. In order to avoid timing problems the music is compiled into temporary storage and then output to the box at a constant rate, rather than played in "real time".

> The music system has been designed with specific uses in mind. (See, e.g., the papers of Jeanne Bamberger.)

Following this name, I found:

> Bamberger was appointed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1970 to 2001, where she taught in the Music and Theater Arts Section. At MIT, she attended a day-long seminar in April 1970 organized by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert, then co-directors of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, on "Teaching Children Thinking".

> Learning about Papert's development of Logo and Minsky’s digital music box, Bamberger was inspired to embark on a career combining music, computers, developmental psychology, and education to change how music was taught.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Bamberger

thanks!

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