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My two earliest programming memories: - Using logo to draw stuff, and watching my brother using it to draw a recursive tree and copying him - Copying[1] games

by SCdF 9y ago

My two earliest programming memories: - Using logo to draw stuff, and watching my brother using it to draw a recursive tree and copying him - Copying[1] games out of old magazines to play them, including torturous sessions with my brother where one of us would read out the assembler array[2] and the other would type it in. Now, I might not be great, but I'm definitely Good Enough™, and I would count those two experiences as protozoic versions of this kind of educational coding software: make a picture do something, plus video games (because kids like video games). [1] Yes, I was born for stack overflow [2] This was an Amstrad c64, and some of the game was BASIC, but for the clever stuff they'd encode a giant array of machine code and just have you type it in. This got me interested in assembler, and I learn (some) while I was there.

Malic 9y ago
"Copying games out of old magazines to play them" - a big yes here. I learned SO much from tracking down typos. It forced you to look at the code, understand how pieces of it worked, so you could fix it. Your reward? A fun little game. That was enough incentive.
- jbverschoor 9y ago
  Exactly. yay 80s
- cr0sh 9y ago
  ...except those games and other pieces of code that were machine language "disguised" as a BASIC loader with an almost literal ton of DATA statement to POKE in all the machine code. You'd sit there for hours, typing page-after-mind-numbing-page of DATA statements - numbers and commas would blur together. Then - once you had it all typed in (largest one I typed in had to have been around 16K of text - took up around 10 or so pages in the magazine) - you were smart to save it to disk or tape (actually, the smart thing was to save it incrementally as you worked, and break up the task over a few sessions). If you didn't and you ran it and it had a bug - CRASH - computer would give you a visual (sometimes audio) "lightshow" if you were lucky, but usually, the computer would just hang or reboot - and all the code would be lost. The fun was just beginning! Now, if you still had the code saved - you could load it back up, and start the arduous process of comparing the code to what the magazine printed. You'd hope like hell that the magazine wasn't misprinted, or hadn't left a section out, or that the printing wasn't illegible (and you confused things - seriously, wasn't that one of the charms of those days - the listings were printed off a cheap 9-pin dot matrix printer then lithographed for printing - causing all sorts of artifacts to confuse the typist?)... Some magazines printed next to each line a checksum, which you could run a program to type the lines in and use to compare with the number (it would calculate it on the fly) - but as a kid, I was too stupid to know what it was for, and it seemed pointless. I probably should've read the fine print on that one, but I probably couldn't - because it was too schmeared by the cheap printing...
  - Rusky 9y ago
    They weren't all that long or written in machine code. I mostly typed in BASIC programs that fit on a single page. The games weren't that sophisticated, obviously, but it was still fun.
  - Malic 9y ago
    Ah then there was MLX! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MLX_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MLX_(software) TL;DR - MLX was a BASIC app for the C64 that allowed the key entry of hex code with checksums and live validation.
linker3000 9y ago
Happy days at school - about 1978/9 - I was 13... Commodore PET 3016 - PET BASIC Acorn System 1 - 6502 machine code BBC Micro (pre-prod unit) - BBC BASIC Later at home: Commodore 64 - BASIC and machine code

by SCdF 9y ago

Malic 9y ago

"Copying games out of old magazines to play them" - a big yes here. I learned SO much from tracking down typos. It forced you to look at the code, understand how pieces of it worked, so you could fix it. Your reward? A fun little game. That was enough incentive.

jbverschoor 9y ago
Exactly. yay 80s
cr0sh 9y ago
...except those games and other pieces of code that were machine language "disguised" as a BASIC loader with an almost literal ton of DATA statement to POKE in all the machine code. You'd sit there for hours, typing page-after-mind-numbing-page of DATA statements - numbers and commas would blur together. Then - once you had it all typed in (largest one I typed in had to have been around 16K of text - took up around 10 or so pages in the magazine) - you were smart to save it to disk or tape (actually, the smart thing was to save it incrementally as you worked, and break up the task over a few sessions). If you didn't and you ran it and it had a bug - CRASH - computer would give you a visual (sometimes audio) "lightshow" if you were lucky, but usually, the computer would just hang or reboot - and all the code would be lost. The fun was just beginning! Now, if you still had the code saved - you could load it back up, and start the arduous process of comparing the code to what the magazine printed. You'd hope like hell that the magazine wasn't misprinted, or hadn't left a section out, or that the printing wasn't illegible (and you confused things - seriously, wasn't that one of the charms of those days - the listings were printed off a cheap 9-pin dot matrix printer then lithographed for printing - causing all sorts of artifacts to confuse the typist?)... Some magazines printed next to each line a checksum, which you could run a program to type the lines in and use to compare with the number (it would calculate it on the fly) - but as a kid, I was too stupid to know what it was for, and it seemed pointless. I probably should've read the fine print on that one, but I probably couldn't - because it was too schmeared by the cheap printing...
- Rusky 9y ago
  They weren't all that long or written in machine code. I mostly typed in BASIC programs that fit on a single page. The games weren't that sophisticated, obviously, but it was still fun.
- Malic 9y ago
  Ah then there was MLX! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MLX_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MLX_(software) TL;DR - MLX was a BASIC app for the C64 that allowed the key entry of hex code with checksums and live validation.

linker3000 9y ago

Happy days at school - about 1978/9 - I was 13... Commodore PET 3016 - PET BASIC Acorn System 1 - 6502 machine code BBC Micro (pre-prod unit) - BBC BASIC Later at home: Commodore 64 - BASIC and machine code