[Coco] CoCo Rom pak

[wdg3rd at comcast.net]

----- "Donald Person" <donald.person at gmail.com> wrote:

> > So, does the ROM version of Color LOGO simply not work on the
> CoCo3,
> > or did I get a bad pak?
> 
>     You must've gotten a bad pak. I'm using the VCC emulator (thanks
> again 
> for the suggestion all!) and Logo works fine.
> 
> > Implmentations like this is why LOGO was dismissed as a toy. :-( )
> 
>     I agree that it was considered a toy by most people and thus
> dismissed, 
> because as a kid I learned a lot about programming by using Logo.
> Between 
> Color basic and Color Logo, I learned a hell of a lot in a short
> time.
>     I have had the chance to talk with a few kids who are attending
> college 
> for computer programming, and it's sad to say but many of them just
> don't 
> have any knowledge at all before they start school; no "base" to start
> from. 
> It really is sad because some of the most interesting things I learned
> as a 
> kid was at the keyboard of a CoCo! I think it's *partly* do to how
> well the 
> user manuals were written. I've looked at all the "Sam's" and
> "Dummies" 
> books for different languages and none of them can compare with the 
> simplicity of the old Radio Shack books.
> 
> *sigh*  I got off track, didn't I?  Always happens when I'm talking
> about 
> the early 80's  hehehe :-P

It wasn't that early in the 80s, Color LOGO came out in '84.

I taught a number of "Computer Camps" that summer and the one after.  Started the kids with Color LOGO, then through PILOT, and then BASIC (generally with example programs that did the same things different ways).  While I'd taught BASIC to kids as young as five starting in 1980 (my first ever BASIC class in an RSCC had a kid that young and a lady nine decades older who wanted to learn to program her new Pocket Computer One to work the horse racing odds [this was in Vegas, after all]), this sequence worked great.  (Yeah, I realize that teaching kids BASIC ruins them forever as programmers -- was it Dijkstra or Wirth who said that? -- I'm not sober enough to track it down just now).
-- 
Ward Griffiths        wdg3rd at comcast.net

<home.comcast.net/~wdg3rd>