From Powerful Ideas to PowerPoint

When computer literacy was almost synonymous with programming, the programming-in-education advocates were divided into two camps: those who supported BASIC as the language of choice and those who supported the Logo language. BASIC, developed at Dartmouth and with a long history of use in educational settings, had a head start, a strong 'installed base' of users, master teachers, and teaching materials. Logo, developed in Cambridge-based research centres and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had been built from the start with child users in mind. It presented itself as the language that could best use programming to transmit programming's most powerful ideas.