3 ms·

>Yes I had an experience writing a baseball stats program on a Commodore 64 using BASIC. All of the data were in data statements and saved with the program on t

by amasad 10y ago

>Yes I had an experience writing a baseball stats program on a Commodore 64 using BASIC. All of the data were in data statements and saved with the program on tape until we could afford a floppy drive and then store data in a serial file and load it in the Baseball stats program. So you had the program rewrite itself every time it ran to edit the data statements? That would be fascinating. I think sharing these stories are awesome. Constraints in programming are always fascinating and they create awesome hacks. And to me the most fascinating is when you invent something radical -- at least to you -- that is actually a known concept in Computer Science.

orionblastar 10y ago
Yeah I lost the disks I had with the C64 when I let a friend borrow it and he never returned it and moved away from our neighborhood. But programming the Commodore 64 was a challenge because BASIC on it was primitive and older than some of the others out there like the Atari 8 bit series. I learned what peek and poke accessed parts of the C64 memory you needed to know what they did to write video games and control sprites. If you wanted to write code that changes the data statements you had to know what area of memory it used and use poke to put it there. In a way I guess you are right that it was self modifying code in that it changed the data statement. I'm sure other people did that as well. When all you have is a Commodore 64 before the Internet, best you could do is read magazines like Compute!s Gazette and get on BBS systems and talk to other programmers to get ideas and share tricks we learned. The Commodore 64 was like the Raspberry PI of the 1980s, it was cheap and it worked. I might buy a Raspberry PI some day.
- amasad 10y ago
  That's a very cool story! Let me know if you'd like to publish it on Medium under the "childhood hacks" page I put together. I'm trying to get as much stories like this under one roof as possible. Should be fun.

by amasad 10y ago

orionblastar 10y ago

Yeah I lost the disks I had with the C64 when I let a friend borrow it and he never returned it and moved away from our neighborhood. But programming the Commodore 64 was a challenge because BASIC on it was primitive and older than some of the others out there like the Atari 8 bit series. I learned what peek and poke accessed parts of the C64 memory you needed to know what they did to write video games and control sprites. If you wanted to write code that changes the data statements you had to know what area of memory it used and use poke to put it there. In a way I guess you are right that it was self modifying code in that it changed the data statement. I'm sure other people did that as well. When all you have is a Commodore 64 before the Internet, best you could do is read magazines like Compute!s Gazette and get on BBS systems and talk to other programmers to get ideas and share tricks we learned. The Commodore 64 was like the Raspberry PI of the 1980s, it was cheap and it worked. I might buy a Raspberry PI some day.

amasad 10y ago
That's a very cool story! Let me know if you'd like to publish it on Medium under the "childhood hacks" page I put together. I'm trying to get as much stories like this under one roof as possible. Should be fun.