When my Dad bought us the Commodore VIC-20 computer back in 1980, it came with a cartridge program called Turtle Graphics which on the surface looked like graphical software that allows you to draw vector shapes by giving instructions to a turtle-looking cursor, telling it to turn and walk a step at a time. Later I learned that the instructions were part of a programming language called Logo.
Logo was an educational programming language, designed in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon. The language was conceived to teach concepts of programming, similar to modern-day Scratch programming. But unlike Scratch, you have to type in specific commands line by line to make a turtle move or draw a line.
Back when computers were new, being able to draw lines on a television screen was a totally amazing experience. I would go on to learn how to loop collections of instructions called functions to create even more amazing vector shapes which gave me a fundamental understanding of how computer graphics work.
Today, while Scratch has replaced Turtle as the beginner’s programming language, you can still experience Turtle through the following modern rendition:
