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> I'm amazed I had the patience to write "large" programs in BASIC in my youth with the limitations that were present. what else did you have to do with your t
by mgkimsal 8y ago
> I'm amazed I had the patience to write "large" programs in BASIC in my youth with the limitations that were present.
what else did you have to do with your time? :)
i've had similar thoughts, but looking back, outside of gaming, the entire use of the computer, for me, was keying in programs. some were from others (in magazines/books), and some were learning to write my own. for the first few years of having one, i had no bbs connections, so... there was really nothing else to do except read books/magazines and type in programs.
- stevekemp 8y agoI guess that's true! I switched from writing in BASIC to writing in Z80 assembly after a year or two - though it has to be said that I "compiled" my program by hand, referring to the opcode table(s) at the back of the manual. My resulting programs tended to look like this: 10 FOR N=60000 TO 60000 + 20 20 READ A 30 POKE N,A 40 NEXT N 50 RANDOMIZE USR 60000 100 DATA 1,2,3,4,5,.... As you can imagine it was a tedious process. Most of my time was really spent trying to hack games for extra-lives, which I guess wasn't so unusual back in the day. Later I used the same skills to patch binaries to accept serial numbers - before I started writing real code in C, Java, Perl, etc, etc.