10 May
2007
10 May
'07
3:27 a.m.
In article <200705100007.l4A07FA5015950 at floodgap.com>,
Cameron Kaiser <spectre at floodgap.com> writes:
In the PLATO system, you wrote software in a language specifically
designed for the computer assisted instruction environment of PLATO.
The language was called "tutor". A very brief entry about it is on
wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TUTOR_programming_language>.
A book that describes the tutor language in detail is here:
<http://www.group-s.net/TUTORLanguage.htm>.
What I remember about "micro tutor" was that it was the same as the
tutor language, with restrictions. IIRC, there was a size restriction
and the syntax was also restricted in the sense that not all of the
tutor commands were supported. I seem to remember that the terminal
housed a Z80 inside and somehow the tutor language was being
interpreted by the Z80 code or cross-compiled to native Z80
instructions. I never did know which, but I know you could load code
directly into the terminal by writing it in ututor and loading it
through the main PLATO system.
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The plasma
terminals were nice, but I also liked the bitmap graphics
terminals. For those, with PLATO, you could write code in "micro
tutor" or "ututor" which you would load into the terminal and it would
execute locally. Some of the best PLATO based games had all the
display stuff written in ututor and the networking and game logic
stuff was written in tutor and coordinated the different terminals.
What was that, a mini-programming language? Was it the internal machine
language of the terminal itself (being fairly ignorant of the architecture),
or a microcode, or ... ?