course · new for 2026
Dr Logo for the Tatung Einstein
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.
You do not need to own an Einstein. Everything here runs on an emulator on your own computer, and everything you need is free.
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.
Twenty-seven sections and two appendices. You start by moving the turtle and end by writing a quiz that asks questions and keeps score, by way of colour, procedures of your own, editing, saving your work, recursion, lists, variables, reading the keyboard, sound, the joystick, charts, curves, patterns, and finding out what went wrong.
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.
Three things, all free: MAME, the Einstein ROM, and the Dr Logo Course Disc from our Downloads page. The disc carries Dr Logo, the two programs Tatung shipped with it in 1984, and 128K of free space for your own work - it is an .mfi rather than a .dsk because MAME will not write to a .dsk, which means a .dsk would lose everything you save. The first section sets all of it up, for macOS and for Windows.
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 here 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.
That mattered more than we expected. The manual gets the version number wrong, gives the wrong syntax for the sound primitive, lists four primitives this release does not have, and never mentions that the Einstein has no square bracket key - which stops a beginner dead on their first repeat. Every listing in the course was run on the machine before it was printed, and every screenshot is of the machine actually doing it. Seventy-seven numbered experiments stand behind the twenty-seven sections, and they are kept so that any claim can be re-checked.
This course was written with Claude Code, directed and tested by Gavin Watson. We say so openly because we think it is the right way to use these tools, and because you deserve to know how the thing you are learning from was built.
