Logo

I loved Logo to pieces in the eighties. I had the Logo cartridge for my Atari 600XL, and I liked it so much that I bought the 64K ‘outboard’ for this machine even though I could not afford it and it make me walk in old jeans and sweaters for a year; not enough nodes to do anything useful in the standard 16K. Now a common misconception about Logo is that it only does Turtles. I spent numerous hours in 1984 to watch random walks of four turtles, but the real use out of it I got was in its capacity as an easier LISP-without-parenthesis. In fact I first understood recursion during my first endeavours with Logo. In Rexx I still use the “parse line first rest first” recursive parse technique that I learned with Logo’s First and Butfirst (LISP’s CAR and CDR). I was excited to see that LCSI still exists and even have their stuff running on the Mac. The manual from 1983 is the only thing I saved (because it smelled rather nice, and epitomized the eighties with pictures of happy people and happy turtles, in a orange and brown design that just became fashionable again). I look forward to use it again for little playthings and sometimes wish I had children to teach it to. Some things in the Mac version need to be fixed, but when they are, I’ll gladly pay for it.