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  • TORTIS (Not quite Logo)

    From Lars Brinkhoff@21:1/5 to All on Mon May 6 06:17:26 2019
    Hello,

    This is not quite Logo, but closely related. Do you remember how there
    were experiments teaching programming to children too small to use Logo?
    It was done by Radia Perlman, who would later go on to become a
    networking guru. She called her program TORTIS, "toddler's own
    recursive turtle interpreter system". It's described in two memos from
    the MIT AI lab.

    I found a copy, and got permission from Perlman to publish it: https://github.com/PDP-10/its-vault/blob/master/files/radia/tortis.31

    It talks to teletype port number 16. Input is from a button box and is
    decoded to send commands, also to port 16. The output is to a physical
    floor turtle.

    I would be happy to work with someone to emulate this in software. The
    TORTIS program would be running on a PDP-10 emulator, and port 16 is
    available as a network TCP port. I suggest there could be a GUI with
    the buttons, and a turtle to draw lines on the screen.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From michaelt@media.mit.edu@21:1/5 to Lars Brinkhoff on Tue May 7 05:03:21 2019
    MIT Logo Memo 9, written by Radia Perlman i1974 is about TORTIS. It's linked from http://web.sonoma.edu/users/l/luvisi/logo/logo.memos.html


    On Monday, May 6, 2019 at 2:17:27 AM UTC-4, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
    Hello,

    This is not quite Logo, but closely related. Do you remember how there
    were experiments teaching programming to children too small to use Logo?
    It was done by Radia Perlman, who would later go on to become a
    networking guru. She called her program TORTIS, "toddler's own
    recursive turtle interpreter system". It's described in two memos from
    the MIT AI lab.

    I found a copy, and got permission from Perlman to publish it: https://github.com/PDP-10/its-vault/blob/master/files/radia/tortis.31

    It talks to teletype port number 16. Input is from a button box and is decoded to send commands, also to port 16. The output is to a physical
    floor turtle.

    I would be happy to work with someone to emulate this in software. The TORTIS program would be running on a PDP-10 emulator, and port 16 is available as a network TCP port. I suggest there could be a GUI with
    the buttons, and a turtle to draw lines on the screen.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)