PILOT

PILOT, short for Programmed Inquiry, Learning, or Teaching, is a small high-level programming language from the 1960s built for computer-assisted instruction. It began in 1960 when John Amsden Starkweather, a psychology professor at the University of California, San Francisco medical center, wrote a system for automating computer question-and-answer tests, first running on an IBM 1620 as COMPUTEST. Funded by a grant from the U.S. Office of Education, he expanded it into PILOT, shown in early form in 1966 and nearly complete in 1968, and it entered the public domain the following year. The language is imperative and resembles BASIC and Fortran in layout, but its commands are single letters, such as T to type text and A to accept input, and a later machine-independent specification, PILOT-73, and a portable Core PILOT subset kept the many dialects aligned. Microcomputer versions such as Atari PILOT added turtle graphics and sound, and an IEEE standard was published in 1991 before being withdrawn.