Sat, 06 Aug 2022

Discovering the logo programming language

I learnt programming when I was 7 years old.
It was not at school.
It was at a recreational place called La maison des enfants located rue Guillaume Brochon in Bordeaux.
I used to spend time there on wednesday afternoon taking some "cooking classes".

Once, the cooking professor was not available and I joined the computer room with a couple of TO7 Thomson computers.

There, I discovered LOGO (and little of BASIC).
There, I discovered how to draw figures.
There, I discovered loop constructs (not just GOTO).
There, I discovered parametric procedures (not just GOSUB).
There, I never joined the cooking class again...

Links:

• a Logo primer (in french).
• the BYTE magazine issued a complete volume on Logo with a Beginner's guide (mirrored here)

And after logo...

Thomson MO5
At other recreational places, then at school.
Mostly BASIC programming.

Amstrad CPC6128
Mostly BASIC programming at home.
Sadly no Z80 assembly yet.
Swapping discs with friends at school (thanks to Hercule II+ and Discology).

PC Compatible / 386DX33
Pascal programming using Borland Turbo Pascal.
Read the very nice PASCALISSIME magazine.
Then C programming using Borland Turbo C.
Then DOS/VGA programming in C and x86 Assembly.
Turbo C and TASM in real-mode.

HP48S
Mostly Saturn processor assembly programming.
20bits addressing, 64bits data registers and 4bits quartet words (for BCD).

Pentium
Then came the Pentium era with 32bits protected mode, TASM and Watcom C/ASM. Spent hours in reading .TXT tutorials and .ASM source code under DOS/WIN95.