Marvin Minsky 2500 Logo Computer
Marvin Minsky is a well-known figure within the computing field. He co-founded the MIT AI Lab, has published many articles on AI, computational intelligence and invented the confocal microscopy and the useless machine. Did you know that he was also a codeveloper of Logo’s first \”turtle\” and created a computer to run Logo programs in an educational setting? The original schematics of his Turtle Terminal TT2500 machine (a reference in 1970 to its target price of $2500) are now available to you after digging through some PDP-10 cassettes owned by the MIT Media Lab.
The machine was built in an unusual way. By attaching discrete TTL sockets to a large panel (about 300), the interconnect was automatically performed using a computer controlled wiring machine which read the design off magnetic tape. The 2,500 were 16-bit instructions that could be defined by the user and read from a 4k control storage. The instruction microcode was read out of a 1k store of microcodes backed up by 64k RAM. It was unusually configured with a dual-display configuration. One text display and another vector display were used to render real-time graphics. It was designed to run [Seymour Papert]’s Logo programming language, but due to the machine’s small control store this was not possible. It was converted into a display for a computer connected to the internet with enough resources. This New Yorker article will tell you more about the fascinating time period in AI and [Minsky’s] life.
Below is a demonstration of [Lars Brinkhoff]’s simulation of the TT2500, running on a PDP11/45 emulated. This is a great story! In 2016, we covered the death of this great man. We think it’s worth reading again. We’ve covered the useless machines from simple to complex.
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