Dr Logo for the Tatung Einstein

Coming Soon

This course is being written now and is not ready yet. There are no lessons to read at the moment. When the first sections are finished they will appear here, and we will say so in the news.

If you would like to be told when it opens, the newsletter signup at the foot of any page is the place to do it.

What It Will Be

Dr Logo is one of the three languages Tatung supplied on the Einstein's own System Master Disc, alongside Xtal BASIC and BBC BASIC. You move a turtle around the screen with plain English words, and drawings come out of it. It was meant for people who had never programmed before, and it is still one of the most enjoyable ways to start.

Unlike our Z80 assembly course, which builds one game across thirty sections, this one is a series of small self contained programs, each showing one thing the machine can do. Logo rewards small pieces that fit together, so the course is shaped the same way. It also means that if you stop after ten sections you have ten working programs rather than an unfinished one.

Everything happens inside Dr Logo itself. You boot the disc, type LOGO, and work at the ? prompt, editing your procedures and saving your work exactly as somebody would have done in 1984. There is no separate editor or toolchain to install.

How It Is Being Made

The same way as the assembly course. Dr Logo on the Einstein is its own specific product, and it does not always behave like the Dr Logo on other machines or like any other Logo. So nothing is taken from another implementation, from a general Logo tutorial, or even from Tatung's own 1984 manual without first running it on the machine and watching what happens. Where the manual and the machine disagree, the machine wins. The experiments that settle each question are kept alongside the course.

The software itself is already in the library, on the TC01 System Master Disc, and the original Tatung manual is archived as Dr. Logo Introduction.