Code Like It's 198x

Rocky's Boots

Logic gates you could pick up and wire together

Classic GamesSource-checked

The Learning Company's 1982 Apple II program by Warren Robinett and Leslie Grimm, in which children built working logic machines from AND, OR and NOT gates, sensors and a kicking boot. Priced at $75 on launch, it later came out for the IBM PC and PCjr, the Commodore 64 and the Tandy Color Computer, was still on sale in 1988, and led to Robot Odyssey.

In Rocky’s Boots electricity is orange. You move a small cursor around a world of rooms, and wherever it touches a socket, current flows and the wire glows. Plug a sensor that spots green shapes into a boot, and the boot kicks every green shape that passes. Put an OR gate between two sensors and the boot, and it kicks circles and squares but lets triangles go by. The Learning Company released it for the Apple II in 1982, and it set out to teach children aged about nine the logic that sits at the bottom of every computer. COMPUTE!’s education writer Glenn Kleiman called it “an exciting and innovative program, one which makes the often proclaimed educational potential of personal computers a reality”.

Fast facts

Building a machine

Kleiman reviewed an early copy for COMPUTE! in October 1982. The program was organised in six levels, each a set of rooms joined edge to edge, and each room held an explanation, a demonstration or an exercise. You moved between them with a joystick or the keyboard and carried parts around with you, much as the player carries objects from screen to screen in Robinett’s Atari Adventure.

The first level taught you how to move and pick things up. The second introduced the actuators, parts that do something when current reaches them: a clacker that makes a noise, a thruster that moves and the boot that kicks. You had to find out what each one did by touching it with the charged cursor. Then came sensors, each of which sends out current when it detects one class of object: one reacts to green things, another to squares. After those came the NOT, AND and OR gates.

With those parts you could play the games. Each one names the objects your machine should kick. You score points when it kicks the right ones and lose them when it kicks the wrong ones. Once the machine is built, you throw a switch and a stream of shapes flows into the room. You can slow the stream or stop it to watch the current move through your circuit. The later levels add flip-flops, clocks and delays, and harder games to build them into.

When the Commodore 64 version came out, George Beekman described the same structure for Commodore Microcomputers as a menu of six choices: How to Move, Building Machines, Logic Gates, Rocky’s Boots, Flip Flops and Rocky’s Challenge. The games had names like “Diamonds or Green” and “Non-Circles”. Rocky’s Challenge held 32 harder machines to build in 15 rooms, and it let players design and save games of their own. The manual printed the solutions, a map of the 15 rooms and a glossary of the real electronic parts the game’s parts stood for. If a machine did not work, Beekman wrote, “experimentation, debugging, and rebuilding are in order”.

According to a modern encyclopedia account, the Rocky of the title is a raccoon who dances when a machine scores perfectly.

Who made it

Warren Robinett’s own page on the game credits it to “Warren Robinett and Leslie Grimm”. Robinett had programmed Adventure at Atari. In March 1983 Video Games called him a co-founder of The Learning Company. BYTE’s account of the company that May explains how he got there. The educational psychologist Ann Piestrup won a $130,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Education, and founded The Learning Company to receive it. She brought in the mathematics educator Teri Perl and Robinett, “a member of the original group of programmers at Atari”. The programs they made during the grant year went into the public domain, and they persuaded investors to put $300,000 into the company in January 1982. That year it released Rocky’s Boots.

Grimm was one of the company’s programmers. In 1984 Family Computing named her as a role model for girls who wanted to program, and said that she and her daughter Cori had designed six games together.

Reception

Designers admired it. Chris Crawford, who ran Atari’s games research group, wrote in The Art of Computer Game Design (1984): “My favorite entry to date is ROCKY’S BOOTS, a children’s game about Boolean logic and digital circuits.” It showed, he wrote, “the vast educational potential of computer games”. In November 1984 Commodore Microcomputers reported that it had “been called an electronic erector set and won several awards”. Robinett’s page lists Software of the Year awards from Learning magazine and Parent’s Choice in 1983, second place in InfoWorld’s 1982 awards, and a Gold Award from the Software Publishers Association for selling 100,000 copies.

Beekman thought the program suited “the nine-and-up crowd”, though younger children could enjoy it “even if they don’t understand everything they see”. He liked what the Learning Company’s programs left out: “There are no nerve-wracking time limits or invading aliens in these games. More importantly, there are no losers.”

Other computers

The game spread to other machines over the next four years. In August 1984 IBM itself released a version for the PC and PCjr at $49.95, one of a batch of educational programs for its home computer. By November 1984 it was on the Commodore 64, and Commodore Microcomputers reviewed the 64 version in 1985 at $34.95. Radio Shack’s 1986 catalogue sold it for the 64K Color Computer at $34.95, calling it “Hailed as a software classic by the New York Times”. In May 1988 COMPUTE! still listed it for the Apple II, the 64 and MS-DOS at $34.95 to $49.95, and called it “another award-winner” whose logic gates “resemble Rube Goldberg contraptions”.

Robot Odyssey

The Learning Company announced Robot Odyssey in June 1984, for teenagers rather than younger children. Commodore Microcomputers called it “the next step beyond” Rocky’s Boots. Mike Wallace and Leslie Grimm designed it, and it was built on the Rocky’s Boots code. It kept the orange current and the logic gates, and put them inside robots that the player had to wire up to escape an underground city.

Sources

  • COMPUTE! issue 28, September 1982, p. 214: new products (the “Discovery Tool” family, Apple, $75).
  • Glenn Kleiman, “Computer Simulations: Learning Through Exploration, Discovery, And Play”, COMPUTE! issue 29, October 1982, pp. 108–113: the six levels, the rooms, orange electricity, the actuators, sensors and gates, the OR-gate example, scoring, and the verdict.
  • BYTE vol. 7 no. 11, November 1982: new software listing (ages 7 and up, Apple II, $75).
  • Video Games vol. 1 no. 6, March 1983, pp. 14–15: news pages (Robinett as co-founder of The Learning Company).
  • “BYTE West Coast: Ferment in Silicon Valley”, BYTE vol. 8 no. 5, May 1983, pp. 268–269: the founding of The Learning Company, Perl and Robinett, the grant programs, and the January 1982 investment.
  • Chris Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design (Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1984), chapter 2: “My favorite entry to date”.
  • “Junior Goes to School: Educational, Graphics Programs Released by IBM”, Home Computer Magazine vol. 4 no. 4, September 1984, p. 67: the IBM PC and PCjr version, $49.95.
  • Charlotte Beyers, feature on girls and computers, Family Computing vol. 2 no. 8, August 1984, p. 39: Leslie Grimm.
  • Commodore Microcomputers, November/December 1984, p. 93: the Commodore 64 version, “electronic erector set”, Robot Odyssey as “the next step beyond”.
  • George Beekman, review of Gertrude’s Secrets, Gertrude’s Puzzles and Rocky’s Boots, Commodore Microcomputers, September/October 1985, pp. 18–20: the menu, the games, Rocky’s Challenge, the manual, the price and the quotes.
  • Radio Shack Software Reference and Tandy Computer Guide (1986): Rocky’s Boots for the Color Computer, catalogue number 26-3283, $34.95.
  • Fred D’Ignazio, “Kids, Computers, and Summer Vacation”, COMPUTE! issue 96, May 1988, pp. 22–25: platforms, ages and prices, “another award-winner”.
  • Warren Robinett, “Rocky’s Boots”, warrenrobinett.com (web, secondary): the credit to Robinett and Grimm, the awards and the SPA Gold Award. http://www.warrenrobinett.com/rockysboots/
  • Wikipedia, “Rocky’s Boots” (web, secondary): Rocky as a raccoon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky%27s_Boots

See also

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