The name of the programming language Logo comes from the Greek for "word." The first version of Logo, a dialect of LISP, was developed in 1966 by several researchers and scholars including Wallace Feurzeig, a researcher at Bolt Beranek and Newman, a Cambridge research firm actively engaged in the study of artificial intelligence (AI), and Seymour Papert, a mathematics and education professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Although it was designed originally for MIT's mainframes and minicomputers, within less than a decade, Logo had found a place in elementary school education curricula across the United States. Logo's reach into thousands of elementary school classrooms was made feasible by two technological advances of the 1970s: the creation of computer time-sharing and the development of the first high-level conversational programming language. In 1970 Papert founded the Logo Laboratory at MIT. Logo-based turtles were introduced around 1971, and the...