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| ExperLogo! | |
| This for me is like a very tiny holy grail … I’ve been looking for this for years but have never seen it anywhere, so finding it shrink wrapped is a special treat. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you … NIB ExperLogo. I purchased it on eBay recently and it was not cheap, but frankly I probably would have paid ten times as much. This was a terrific complied Logo platform from ExperTelligence which I used as a young kid circa 1985. I vividly remember how, much like the original Disk Copy, it took over the screen buffer when compiling, filling the screen with random garbage to save memory on a 128k Mac! It also had fantastic turtle (called “bunny” because the system, being compiled, was quite fast) graphics, including 3D and spherical geometry versions, and offered full access to the Mac Toolbox and ROM as well as various LISP-like AI-friendly features (that’s in the ‘80s sense of the term “AI,” of course). To my knowledge it is not currently preserved on any archival site anywhere (perhaps because it was copy protected). I am really excited to see if the disk inside is good, and if perhaps the copy protection is beatable for preservation purposes. I will take a look this weekend! Posted by: Crutch on 2021-11-08 20:02:47 | |
| Beautiful, congratulations! Posted by: pax on 2021-11-08 20:06:36 | |
| I hope to be able to make a similar post one day with MacScheme+Toolsmith. 😅 Posted by: pax on 2021-11-08 20:09:04 | |
| Oh, well found. I'd love to have a play with this. Posted by: cheesestraws on 2021-11-09 02:49:17 | |
| This is so cool - congrats! I'd love to play with this too, should you ever get a working copy uploaded to The Garden (or any of the similar archive sites). Posted by: Huxley on 2021-11-10 11:56:38 | |
| I’m definitely going to want to try this out in Mini vMac if you can manage to get disk dumps of this! It looks super interesting and I would love to try making some cool old logos with it. (Maybe it will run on my PowerBook 170 when I get that thing booting?) Posted by: 3lectr1cPPC on 2021-11-11 12:22:23 | |
| It is an awesome piece of software. I will probably dump the disk this weekend, but it will need some hacking because it is definitely copy protected and I probably won’t get to that for another few weeks due to another current project. Sadly it won’t run on your PB170: this is old software. I know it doesn’t run on a Mac II. I’m not even sure it will run on a 512KE or Plus. It runs great on a 128k Mac or a Fat Mac, though. 🙂 Posted by: Crutch on 2021-11-11 12:58:43 | |
| The copy protection was quite interesting by the way: it won’t let you run the master disk. You have to make a copy, and then periodically insert the master. Posted by: Crutch on 2021-11-11 12:59:52 | |
| Interesting! Unfortunately ExperTelligence probably wasn't thinking about the people nearly 40 years later that would want to be able to dump the disks 🙂 Hopefully Mini vMac will be able to run it. If not, oh well. Posted by: 3lectr1cPPC on 2021-11-11 13:50:49 | |
| I am pretty sure it will work! I’ll post results as soon as I can give it a go. Posted by: Crutch on 2021-11-11 14:42:59 | |
The copy protection was quite interesting by the way: it won’t let you run the master disk. You have to make a copy, and then periodically insert the master. That's unusual and pretty sensible (though perhaps it just means that only one part of the master disk will wear out, the crucial part, rather than all of it) Posted by: cheesestraws on 2021-11-12 03:50:43 | |
| @Crutch Several of us has flux level imagers. So if you're comfortable with lending the disks, one of us could make master images that can include the copy protection when copied. Edit: Alternatively, you can try using DiskDup. It might be able to make a clean copy if you tell it to include "unused" and "bad" sectors. Posted by: olePigeon on 2021-11-12 12:27:47 | |
| Good call I’ll try that. The disk is good (excellent!), the files all copied over but it looks like it indeed uses bad sector copy protection so Disk Copy won’t make an image (as you inferred). There is one invisible file that can’t be copied. The good news is, that suggests the copy protection will be extremely easy to bypass for preservation purposes. Posted by: Crutch on 2021-11-13 08:57:19 | |
The copy protection was quite interesting by the way: it won’t let you run the master disk. You have to make a copy, and then periodically insert the master.I think I remember Deja Vu II asking for the master disk periodically in a similar manner. You can run the game from disk, but the manual instructs you to copy the game file to HD and insert the master disk when asked. You can’t copy the disk in any of the usual programs I think, due to the copy protection. Posted by: pax on 2021-11-14 09:10:54 | |
| Apologies for revivifying an old thread, but did this ever get archived @Crutch ? Can’t find it in the usual places. Posted by: elbaroni on 2025-11-10 16:48:03 | |
| Reason I ask is that this book showed up today, which has its examples for some reason in ExperLogo. PDF of the book at Vintage Apple. Posted by: elbaroni on 2025-12-02 04:19:00 | |
| Posted by: elbaroni on 2025-12-02 04:26:12 | |
@elbaroni I absolutely love the waite group books. C Primer Plus by Prata from The Waite Group is how I learned C. Turns out there's a mac specific version I'd be interested to find one day! Looks like fun: Turns out our own @Crutch found a copy of the C compiler used in the book! Hmmm, projects.... 😼 Sweet find! Posted by: wthww on 2025-12-08 22:06:58 | |
| Oh, this is great. I had that exact same AI book back when it was new, no idea what happened to it. Anyway, thanks for the ping here, as I mentioned in my DM to @elbaroni I got distracted and never did upload that binary. I will try to do it ASAP and let you know. Posted by: Crutch on 2025-12-14 15:32:05 | |
Oh, this is great. I had that exact same AI book back when it was new, no idea what happened to it. Anyway, thanks for the ping here, as I mentioned in my DM to @elbaroni I got distracted and never did upload that binary. I will try to do it ASAP and let you know.Were you able to get the disk flux imaged by an AppleSauce or the like? Posted by: LaPorta on 2025-12-14 17:11:13 |