klotz

Gary Killdall tried to buy Terrapin. It was unfavorable terms and I didn't agree. He went away mad and wrote something in C an implementation of what looked like Logo but I don't know how he choose to implement it. I remember him talking about structs of various sorts at one point, instead of using lists so I assume he was concerned about efficiency. I never had a discussion with them about their interest in pedagogy so I can't comment.

Quite the resource list, Don! You should put in links to the Adventure game you wrote for the C64 Logo, and we listed you by name and age.

The assembler was already chosen, probably by Steve Hain or Gary Drescher. I believe it was CROSS. It annoyed me that I would get phase errors if I edited during the first pass which was like 10 or 15 minutes at night so I wrote a one-pass assembler in MacLisp, but it was slower to finish than the first pass of CROSS so I translated it to Logo and Hal said to put it on the utilities disk. I can't remember who added .output and .input but Logo had had them before the Apple II, I think 11Logo had it.

Thank you Don! I was going to comment that I wrote a 6502 assembler in Logo for the Apple II and the C64 and it shipped with it and it was documented how to write in assembler. I was hoping to hear some kid learned 6502 assembler from it. That counts you out since you already knew 6502 assembler.

Which version of Logo and which Lisp? Have you read SICP? Hal Abelson is responsible for getting Logo out of MIT and into the world of the Apple II, and with GJS for SICP. Logo and Lisp connections go way back though, to it's inception with BBN and MIT people.

Thank you for doing this, Lars, and thank you for all the amazing historical research and preservation you are doing on the PDP-10 and the origins of operating systems, Lisp, Logo, symbolic math Macsyma, and all of the software and system zeitgeist that produced Logo. We always felt like we were packaging up what our AI lab hacker culture was like, in "mind-sized bites" as Seymour said.

I remember using the Boehm GC in C++ in 1989. I wrote a Symbolics Lisp to G++ compiler called XL when. I was at Fuji Xerox and PARC and used it to convert Statice, the first object-oriented database, from Lisp to C++. The server side was a transactional block server and didn't do much consing, but the code flow for the Lisp side did not conveniently map into the C++ stack/ctor/dtor model of memory allocation, so I used the Boehm GC. sadly, the compiler, XL, got lost in a tar fire.