Dr. Logo

The world's best computer teacher

Oct 17, 2022

The Company

If you have read about the history of the personal computer, you’ve probably heard the name Gary Kildall. For those who didn’t, let me fill in the blanks. In 1974, Kildall developed an operating system for his computer, Control Program/Monitor or CP/M. Kildall realized that others were interested in buying his operating system for their own system, so he created Intergalactic Digital Research to sell his products. Someone told Kildall that corporate buyers would not take his business seriously with a scifi name, so he changed the name to simply Digital Research.

For many years, CP/M was the most popular operating system for personal computers. That was until MS-DOS appeared on the scene. (That’s a larger story that I may cover in the future.) Digital Research responded by releasing CP/M-86. They followed this up with a more advanced DOS, DR-DOS. However, neither could complete with MS-DOS.

Kildall would also co-host the Computer Chronicles from 1983 to 1990. You can check out episodes of the Computer Chronicles on Archive.org.

The Product

Digital Research didn’t just product operating systems, they also ported programming languages to their operating systems. In this case their port of the Logo programming language was named Dr. Logo. (Logo was an educational programming language released in 1967.) The original version was released for the IBM PC in 1983. There was both a 8-bit and 16-bit version. Apparently, the 8-bit version was written in Lisp, but the 16-bit version was written in C.

The March 1984 issue of PC Mag finished their review of Dr. Logo with these words:

“All things considered, I’m happy to see that Dr. Logo and his turtle have come out to play with us, and hope that any shortcomings will be fixed in later versions. Doctor Logo, heal thyself!