In the month of July, 1994, when I got re-admitted to my school, I was in the fourth grade, and in a different section (IV C). On that day, I met another new admission like me, who became my best friend in the school. As is common with me, I just needed an excuse to be nervous, and that was one of such days. Later in the day, we had a computer class. It was the first time, I saw the computer, the green colored screens. The teacher booted every terminal with a floppy disk, and started LOGO (language of graphics oriented, as I learned later). We were asked to type and run, following commands on the screen in the text area, after the question mark prompt, and the small triangular thing (turtle) would draw a square:
FD 100 RT 90 FD 100 RT 90 FD 100 RT 90 FD 100 RT 90
Typing these lines took everyone like five minutes, bottleneck being finding the keys on the keyboard. 😛
It was fun making turtle draw shapes. In the whole course, I learnt to draw square, rectangle, circle, and then swastika by myself. It lasted like 2 years, and then I moved on to BASIC, and then C, and then I slowly forgot about LOGO. I once wrote to the author of my first C book, thanking him for the easy to understand text (for 12 years old me). However I never thought about LOGO, the language that laid the foundations for me, or its creators. Yesterday, I came across this tweet, and suddenly reminded of LOGO. I felt sorry, and wished I could have at least written a thank you note to the author, for changing the life of yet another human.
Thank you for creating it, Mr. Papert, and everyone else who has worked with him on this.
R.I.P. Mr. Papert.