As with many first-of-a-kind devices, the Texas Instruments (TI) TMS0100 calculator chip family was a narrowly defined microcontroller, mostly good for making calculators. However, the first chip in the TMS0100 family, originally called the TM1802NC and later renamed the TMS0102, incorporated everything a microcontroller requires to be a microcontroller: a CPU, RAM, ROM, and I/O.…
Past and Future Turtles: The Evolution of the Logo Programming Language (Part 1)
When I was a young child, one of my best friends was a turtle.
Not a real turtle, although that would have been fun, but a virtual one. My turtle lived inside of an Apple II, an early 8-bit computer, at my elementary school.
When I first met her, my turtle, she didn’t do much. She just sat there. It didn’t take long for me to realize that in order to get her to do something, I would need to prompt her. To do this, there was a literal prompt on the screen, beckoning me to type something.