Hi.
Back in 1969 the Observer newspaper set up a full DEC PDP system in Selfridges in London for a week.
School kids - of which I was one - demoed programming in BASIC to shoppers.
They could find just EIGHT children in the UK who could program computers!
So … my memory fails me .. can anyone provide me with more details of the event?
Thanks.
Note: I may have got the paper and store names wrong!
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It’s a nice idea and I’d love to read about it or see a photo, but I haven’t heard of the event and can’t turn anything up in searches. Perhaps New Scientist would have covered it?
It was a long time ago and I was young so my memory has faded.
However the organisers had set up a huge multi-rack DEC system with spinning tapes and all the bells and whistles. There were maybe 5 or 6 ASR-33 teletypes available.
My school in the UK was donated a timeshare link to a mainframe in 1968.
We could program in BASIC, ALGOL and FORTRAN.
The store demo was at the time of the first moon landing so I wrote a BASIC program to enhance images from the moon in very very slow real time!.
I hand digitized a few images I got from newspapers - it took hours!
I then wrote a program to enhance and de-noise the images.
I used ASCII teletype characters to show pixels!
Each image was 72 x 72 pixels due to the maximum line length of the ASR-33 teletype.
Each image took 2 hours or so to process.
It all seemed to impress the shoppers!
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I don’t know about that particular event but there were more kids than those 8 in the UK who could program - that was around the time that the AI department in Edinburgh was teaching kids at George Heriot’s school (which was a short walk from the AI dept in Forrest Hill). They were being taught using LOGO. I’m not sure which hardware they used, but I think originally it was on Robin Popplestone’s MultiPop OS from '67. By the time I joined the department they were teaching LOGO on EMAS.
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The system would probably have been a PDP-8, but the programming language would have been FOCAL, not BASIC. I can’t find a reference to a BASIC on any PDP system prior to 1973, when David Ahl was pressing the company for one. Logo was only available in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1969, and at that time, the system was running only on an SDS-940 mainframe.
A quick Google search unfortunately could only find some 1978 references to the LOGO in schools project: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/963847.963848 and this paper published in June '78 https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/5744/AIM-484.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y which mentions that the Edinburgh project was ongoing for 3 and a half years, so that dates the start of the use in Heriot’s at Jan '75 roughly. So I think I was wrong about how early it was used in schools but I think Danny Bobrow was at DMIP for a couple of years around late 60’s early 70’s (The Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception, at Edinburgh) and I’m fairly sure I recall coffee-table conversations about some of the early LOGO concepts (if not development) being discussed at Edinburgh and not just MIT and Stanford. It may have been in the context of POP (COWSEL, later POP and then POP2) which could was made to look like LOGO by using syntax directed macros (ie an extensible language) in its incarnation as “logopop” (which is not the same as the later poplog). That would fit with my recollection since Pop (the person, not the language) did his early OS and language research on an Elliot 4-something which is the system I was thinking of in my post above. It’s possible that what I remembered as early LOGO work was actually early POP design that may have influenced LOGO through Danny Bobrow and Edinburgh’s close ties with the MIT researchers.
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Just dropping in to add a document I’d forgotten about: https://history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/archive/docs/how-to-work-the-logo-machine-dai-op-4.pdf - unfortunately there’s no trace of the companion document mentioned on the title page, “Teaching Children LOGO: a metaprimer for ELOGO”
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I’m always here for computers with a HOOT key.
Edinburgh was doing some pretty advanced stuff with LOGO tuition in the mid-1970s.
Surprisingly, this was not the result of schoolboy humor on the part of the Edinburgh kids. Alarm outputs being called hooters goes back to the Atlas:
15) Prepulse Volume Control
This controls the volume of sound from the hooter of a steady
note generated by an oscillator. The oscillator is rendered
operative when prepulses are being obeyed continuously (at more
than 10 Kc/s)
( https://www.gtoal.com/history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/archive/atlas/atlasbible.pdf )
There were some other equally choice names used in early computers although the examples slip my mind at the moment. Which is probably for the better.
I would guess that they might be running TSS-8 .. everyone getting their own instance of BASIC. Of course that would mean that this would be one of the few copies of TSS-8..?