PILOT

Description

PILOT or Programmed Instruction, Learning, or Teaching is a 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, Scotland 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 the turtle graphics system from LOGO and 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.

A list of OS/2 implementations of PILOT

• RPilot - Open Source - Discontinued

A list of DOS implementations of PILOT

• RPilot - Open Source - Discontinued

Publications

• Tom Conlon: PILOT: The Language and How to Use it: Including Apple PILOT and Super PILOT Paperback – 1984 - ISBN: 0136762476 - Out of print.

Standards

• IEEE Std 1154-1991. The only standard in existence and has since been withdrawn.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 1962 called Computest that automated pupil testing and scoring.