The interesting bit is when I was introduced to LOGO on a spare SDS 940 in the basement, it wasn't all about moving a turtle around (I think they were still working on that bit), it was about manipulating strings. The first LOGO program I wrote constructed sentences from lists of nouns and verbs. Later when my mom taught me Lisp, we added prepositions and phrases.

While I was lucky to see LOGO as a child, I completely missed out on the robot phase of the language, which I think was what Seymore Papert was most interested in. (Though I did get to play with a graphical turtle with TI Logo in the very early 80s.)

I re-read Mindstorms a few years ago and I have to think Papert must have thought turtle graphics were a half-measure. A __LOT__ of what he talked about was how children "embody" abstractions to learn how the world works. Somewhere out there I saw a video of kids in the UK who, without a computer, were taking turns being the turtle while other kids recited program instructions to the "turtle." I think the implication was that it embodied many of his research objectives, even thought there was no computer (other than the kids) present.