Wally Feurzeig

Wally Feurzeig (1927 to 2013) was an American computer scientist and artificial intelligence researcher who, with Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon, co-invented the Logo programming language. Born in Chicago, he studied at the University of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology and worked at Argonne National Laboratory before joining Bolt, Beranek and Newman in 1962. At BBN he built MENTOR, described as the first intelligent computer-aided instruction system, which used production rules for problem solving in medical diagnosis and other decision tasks. In 1965 he founded BBN's Educational Technology Department. His group trialled the interactive TELCOMP language with students in eight schools in 1965 and 1966, and the strong response led directly to the idea of a programming language designed expressly for children. BBN also gave the first successful demonstration of computer time-sharing in 1964, the setting in which this work took shape.