PILOT

PILOT or Programmed Instruction, Learning, or Teaching is a fairly simple imperative programming language intended to be easy to use and in particular to teach newbies and children the basics of programming. A predecessor to Logo, PILOT is tiny and could be efficiently implemented on early microprocessors, in the very early days of personal computers in the mid 70's it fought with Pascal, Basic, FOCAL and to a lesser degree FORTH as the language of choice for microcomputers, but for a short while Microsoft hedged it bets by having FOCAL and PILOT tools available as well as Basic. In the end Basic won the day mostly since the first four micro-computers designs that sold in any quantity either had Basic built in, or available at a low cost.

PILOT got something of a second life in the early 80's as an educational language, primarily in the USA, UK and France running on 8 bit 6502 computers, mostly ATARI and Apple II but also on the Commodore 8000 line in France. The 6502 versions evolved into Super PILOT, a system specifically developed for educational use with extensions for controlling external equipment such as slide projectors, tape recorders and laserdiscs. One of the factors was that it was very easy to create question and response programs in PILOT that suited the teaching of languages for instance down to a tee, by hooking it up to external hardware the student could continue at his own pace while getting full A/V instruction. Other PILOT implementations for educational use extended the language by adding the turtle graphics system from LOGO, this included "ATARI PILOT" and a couple of versions for the Commodore 64. Note that Super Pilot was not a product from one company but used for a number of extended implementations from more than one concern, with differing feature sets.

In the 70's IBM and Western Illinois University had an experimental CAI (Computer Aided Instruction) system that was basically an APL system with the PILOT-73 language bolted on that was simply called "The PILOT/APL CAI system".

Also note that it is very difficult to search for any information on the PILOT language, in addition to pilots in general and the Palm Pilot, there appear to exist at the least three operating systems named Pilot and at the least four programming languages that have pilot in the name, so your mileage may vary.

A list of OS/2 implementations of PILOT

• RPilot - Open Source - Discontinued

A list of DOS implementations of PILOT

• Nevada Pilot - Commercial - Discontinued
• RPilot - Open Source - Discontinued
• Taylor Pilot - Open Source - Discontinued - Public Domain

Publications

• Tom Conlon: PILOT: The Language and How to Use it: Including Apple PILOT and Super PILOT Paperback – 1984 - ISBN: 0136762476 - Out of print.
• John Amsden Starkweather: PILOT-73 Guide - 1974 - Out of print
• John Amsden Starkweather: A user's guide to PILOT – 1985 - ISBN: 0139377484 - Out of print.
• John Amsden Starkweather: Computer science instruction in elementary grades; An exploration of computer-based learning methods - 1968 - Out of print
• John Amsden Starkweather: Nevada PILOT: Programmer's reference manual - 1982 (PC version 1984) - Out of print (Some versions of the manual call it Pilot-73 others just Pilot) - Tandy version here

Articles

• PILOT And Logo – A Tale Of Two Languages - From Compute! magazine issue 38 - 1983

Tutorials and other learning material

These are mostly for old 8 and 16 bit PILOT implementations but since the language has very little in way of system specific features they will be useful for lerning just about any version of the language.

• Morrow PILOT User Guide
• Atari PILOT for Beginners
• Atari PILOT External Specifications

Standards

• Pilot-73 - The standard that most mini and microcomputer implementations refer to, believed to have been published in a paper by J. Starkweather and then a year later in the "PILOT-73 Guide" book listed above, but some implementations pre-date the release of the book.
• IEEE Std 1154-1991. The only formal standard in existence and has since been withdrawn.

Pilot history

PILOT was developed by John Amsden Starkweather in 1968 when he was working as a psychology professor at the University of California, USA. It was partly based on an earlier language he had developed in 1960 to 62 called Computest that automated pupil testing and scoring and was implemented on an IBM 1620. It was successful enough for Starkweather to be given a grant in 1965 by the U.S. Office of Education, early versions of the system were shown in 1966 a more or less complete version was shown in 1968 and it was released into the public domain in 1969.

In 1973 Starkweather alongside other people interested in Computer Assisted Learning defined a core language specification that was mostly machine independent and that is usually referred to as PILOT-73, at the same time he made a implementation for the "DATAPOINT" 8008 based microcomputer that was later expanded to work with 8080 and Z80 processors and as that version was also in the Public Domain it was shipped with or made available for a number of 8080/Z80 based CP/M systems. He later expanded the system to work CP/M and DOS on x80 and x86 based systems and those ports were sold at budget price under the name Nevada PILOT by a company called Ellis Computing.