This HN submission is incredibly special to me! I had been searching for this manual for a very long time, finding several closely related documents but never this particular one. When I couldn't locate the manual anywhere, I turned to the HN community with an "Ask HN" post [1].
Remarkably, within just 23 hours, a generous HN user, rmini, scanned all 240 pages of the manual and shared it with us [2].
See the links below for the discussion on the aforementioned "Ask HN" post that resulted in this document becoming available on archive.org! Thank you, @rmini, for your generosity and help!
“How do I move the turtle in Logo” was one of the controversial questions in Stack Overflow back in the date. It was posted by Joel Spolsky, one of the co-creators and then deleted by Jeff Atwood, the other co-creator. I like it because it illustrates the two cultures so well. Joel thought it was a reasonable and answerable question and Jeff thought it wasn’t specific enough to be a real question. In the end Stack Overflow went Jeff’s way which I think is a pity. The question was undeleted later for its “historical significance”: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th...
My first proglang, at age 7, was MSX-LOGO. English is not my first language, but this language was translated to my mother tongue, and came with an instruction book in my mother tongue. So I could get started, all by myself, at a rather young age.
After getting the fundamentals down in MSX-LOGO, I learned BASIC and some part of English at the same time: learning BASIC made learning English fun. This was before I had any classes in English.
I hoped MSX-BASIC allowed me to make fast running programs, but it did not. It was not until many years later that I got introduced to open source. Now I has access to compilers, libraries, languages: everything I needed to make fast programs.
Aware of my new found powers I decided to build a modern version of MSX-LOGO: an integrated programming environment for learning purpose in which the syntax is translated to the mother tongue of the programmer. I got it into the KDE project so it would be translated.
I've met several people who's first experience with programming was with KTurtle in a language other than English (it's currently translated in 25+ languages)
If we want to have a rich open source ecosystem we better make the on-ramp for new contributors are easy as can be. In this way I wanted to give back (help strengthen) the open source commons.
I did a summer school/camp program at my local HS when i was about maybe 10 or 11 where we learned logo on apple //s, they even had a could of turtle robots that were controlled via, i assume, the serial port. So by the end we all got to send one of our programs to the bot to draw out in sharpie on a big roll of craft paper. I'm sure in my parents attic somewhere there it's probably still rolled up in a box.
Love the immediacy and physicality of that to this day, which is why i still love processing as a learning language for kids.
I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is.
While I have never worked as a professional software developer, computers have been a hobby all my life. I don't think the fact that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment.
At least until around 2015 my elementary school was still using Logo as a introduction to programming using a Logo implementation on Windows 7. We had no idea that what we were doing was programming; it was just fun to see what sort of weird/crazy shapes we could come up with and share with other students.
I think its purpose has now been replaced by Scratch, but still, good times and I will always remember that little turtle that brought us tons of fun.
I used turtle in middle school. I think that was my first experience where I got to tell a computer what to do and make something. We had a very limited amount of time in the lab, but I loved every bit if it!