Civil Rights
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
Explore the people, places, events, achievements, struggles and stories that shaped our journey.
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
Innovation, patents, science, technology and world-changing contributions.
Pioneers, champions, Negro Leagues, records, activism and excellence.
Meet the people whose lives, choices and achievements shaped the journey.
Black towns, communities, institutions and places where history happened.
Moments that changed communities, movements, institutions and the nation.
Mansa Musa was the ruler of the Mali Empire in West Africa. Details recorded here should be sourced; unknown information is left blank.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
| Logo | |
|---|---|
L-system (Koch curve) turtle graphic | |
| Paradigms | Multi-paradigm: functional, educational, procedural, reflective |
| Family | Lisp |
| Designed by | Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, Cynthia Solomon |
| Developer | Bolt, Beranek and Newman |
| First appeared | 1967 |
| Typing discipline | Dynamic |
| Website | el |
| Major implementations | |
| UCBLogo, many others | |
| Dialects | |
| StarLogo, NetLogo and AppleLogo | |
| Influenced by | |
| Lisp | |
| Influenced | |
| AgentSheets, NetLogo, Smalltalk, Etoys, Scratch, Microsoft Small Basic, KTurtle, REBOL, Boxer | |

Logo is an educational programming language, designed in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon.[1] The name was coined by Feurzeig while he was at Bolt, Beranek and Newman,[2] and derives from the Greek logos, meaning 'word' or 'thought'.
A general-purpose language, Logo is widely known for its use of turtle graphics, in which commands for movement and drawing produced line or vector graphics, either on screen or with a small robot termed a turtle. The language was conceived to teach concepts of programming related to Lisp and only later to enable what Papert called "body-syntonic reasoning", where students could understand, predict, and reason about the turtle's motion by imagining what they would do if they were the turtle. There are substantial differences among the many dialects of Logo, and the situation is confused by the regular appearance of turtle graphics programs that are named Logo.
Logo is a multi-paradigm adaptation and dialect of Lisp, a functional programming language.[3] There is no standard Logo, but UCBLogo has the facilities for handling lists, files, I/O, and recursion in scripts, and can be used to teach all computer science concepts, as UC Berkeley lecturer Brian Harvey did in his Computer Science Logo Style trilogy.[4]
Logo is usually an interpreted language, although compiled Logo dialects (such as Lhogho and Liogo) have been developed. Logo is not case-sensitive but retains the case used for formatting purposes.
Logo was created in 1967 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), a Cambridge, Massachusetts, research firm, by Wally Feurzeig, Cynthia Solomon, and Seymour Papert.[5] Its intellectual roots are in artificial intelligence, mathematical logic and developmental psychology. For the first four years of Logo research, development, and teaching work was done at BBN. The first implementation of Logo, called Ghost, was written in LISP on a PDP-1. The goal was to create a mathematical land where children could play with words and sentences.[6] Modeled on LISP, the design goals of Logo included accessible power[clarification needed] and informative error messages. The use of virtual turtles allowed for immediate visual feedback and debugging of graphic programming.
The first working Logo turtle robot was created in 1969. A display turtle preceded the physical floor turtle. Modern Logo has not changed very much from the basic concepts predating the first turtle. The first turtle was a tethered floor roamer, not radio-controlled or Wireless. At BBN, Paul Wexelblat developed a turtle named Irving that had touch sensors and could move forward, backwards, rotate, and ding its bell. The earliest year-long school users of Logo were in 1968–69 at Muzzey Jr. High in Lexington, Massachusetts. The virtual and physical turtles were first used by fifth-graders at the Bridge School in the same city in 1970–71.

Logo's most-known feature is the turtle (derived originally from a robot of the same name),[5] an on-screen "cursor" that shows output from commands for movement and a small retractable pen, together producing line graphics. It has traditionally been displayed either as a triangle or a turtle icon (though it can be represented by any icon). Turtle graphics were added to the Logo language by Seymour Papert in the late 1960s to support Papert's version of the turtle robot, a simple robot controlled from the user's workstation that is designed to carry out the drawing functions assigned to it using a small retractable pen set into or attached to the robot's body.
As a practical matter, the use of turtle geometry instead of a more traditional model mimics the actual movement logic of the turtle robot. The turtle moves with commands that are relative to its own position, LEFT 90 means spin left by 90 degrees. Some Logo implementations, particularly those that allow the use of concurrency and multiple turtles, support collision detection and allow the user to redefine the appearance of the turtle cursor, essentially allowing the Logo turtles to function as sprites.
Turtle geometry is also sometimes used in environments other than Logo as an alternative to a strictly coordinate-addressed graphics system. For instance, the idea of turtle graphics is also useful in Lindenmayer system for generating fractals.


Some modern derivatives of Logo allow thousands of independently moving turtles. There are two popular implementations: Massachusetts Institute of Technology's StarLogo and Northwestern University Center for Connected Learning's (CCL) NetLogo. They allow exploring emergent phenomena and come with many experiments in social studies, biology, physics, and other areas. NetLogo is widely used in agent-based simulation in the biological and social sciences.
Although there is no agreed-upon standard, there is a broad consensus on core aspects of the language. In March 2020, there were 308 implementations and dialects of Logo, each with its own strengths.[8] Most of those 308 are no longer in wide use, but many are still under development. Commercial implementations widely used in schools include MicroWorlds Logo and Imagine Logo.
Legacy and current implementations include:
Logo was a primary influence on the Smalltalk programming language. It is also the main influence on the Etoys educational programming environment and language, which is essentially a Logo variant written in Squeak (itself a variant of Smalltalk). Logo influenced the procedure/method model in AgentSheets and AgentCubes to program agents similar to the notion of a turtle in Logo. Logo provided the underlying language for Boxer. Boxer was developed at University of California, Berkeley and MIT and is based on a literacy model, making it easier to use for nontechnical people.[30]
KTurtle is a variation of Logo implemented at Qt for the KDE environment loosely based on Logo.[31]
Two more results of Logo's influence are Kojo, a variant of Scala, and Scratch, a visual, drag-and-drop language which runs in a web browser.
[…] Dr. Logo first appeared on the retail market in the fall of 1983 for the IBM PC and climbed to the top of the Softsel Hot List. The retail release included SpeedStart CP/M, an abridged version of CP/M that boots automatically when the system is turned on. […][1]
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Logo is an educational programming language, designed in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon. The name was coined by Feurzeig while he was at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, and derives from the Greek logos, meaning 'word' or 'thought'. A general-purpose language, Logo is widely known for its use of turtle graphics, in which commands for movement and drawing produced line or vector graphics, either on screen or with a small robot termed a turtle. The language was conceived to teach concepts of programming related to Lisp and only later to enable what Papert called "body-syntonic reasoning", where students could understand, predict, and reason about the turtle's motion by imagining what they would do if they were the turtle. There are substantial differences among the many dialects of Logo, and the situation is confused by the regular appearance of turtle graphics programs that are named Logo. Logo is a multi-paradigm adaptation and dialect of Lisp, a functional programming language. There is no standard Logo, but UCBLogo has the facilities for handling lists, files, I/O, and recursion in scripts, and can be used to teach all computer science concepts, as UC Berkeley lecturer Brian Harvey did in his Computer Science Logo Style trilogy. Logo is usually an interpreted language, although compiled Logo dialects (such as Lhogho and Liogo) have been developed. Logo is not case-sensitive but retains the case used for formatting purposes.
Seymour Aubrey Papert (; 29 February 1928 – 31 July 2016) was a South African-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator, who spent most of his career teaching and researching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, and of the constructionist movement in education. He was co-inventor, with Wally Feurzeig and Cynthia Solomon, of the Logo programming language.
Harold Abelson (born April 26, 1947) is an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor of computer science and engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a founding director of both Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation, creator of the MIT App Inventor platform, and co-author of the widely used textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP), sometimes also referred to as "the wizard book" because of its cover illustration. He directed the first implementation of the language Logo for the Apple II, which made the language widely available on personal computers starting in 1981; and published a widely selling book on Logo in 1982. Together with Gerald Jay Sussman, Abelson developed MIT's introductory computer science subject, "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (often referred to by the MIT course number, 6.001), a subject organized around the idea that a computer language is primarily a formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology, rather than just a way to get a computer to perform operations. Abelson and Sussman also cooperate in codirecting the MIT Project on Mathematics and Computation. The MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) project was spearheaded by Abelson and other MIT faculty. Abelson led an internal investigation of MIT's choices and role in the prosecution of Aaron Swartz by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which concluded that MIT did nothing wrong legally, but recommended that MIT consider changing some of its internal policies.
NetLogo is an open-source programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) for agent-based modeling. It is part of a family of agent-based modeling products, which includes NetLogo Web, NetLogo 3D, NetTango, TurtleUniverse, HubNet, HubNet Web, and BehaviorSpace. It is currently being maintained by the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling (CCL) at the School of Education and Social Policy (SESP), Northwestern University. NetLogo, the programming language, is a Lisp-style programming language with support for lists, “agentsets”, strings, input/output, and plotting. Like the software itself, the programming language is also extensible using the built-in extension manager. Many extensions are available, including support for arrays, tables, matrices as well as integrations with popular programming languages like R and Python.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →The Greenwood District.