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If only I could back in time to visit my younger self... I had 1980's BASIC books in 1992 along with a 386SX running QBASIC. I learned what I could from GORILL

If only I could back in time to visit my younger self... I had 1980's BASIC books in 1992 along with a 386SX running QBASIC. I learned what I could from GORILLAS and NIBBLES. I looked through some books at the mall bookstore, but I didn't know anything about Microsoft C, dBase, and what the hell was CLIPPER? I didn't understand how computers 'worked' until much later. A C64 and an assembly language book might have built a real solid foundation. I didn't know any adults or older kids when I was a kid who did anything with computers. I think that if my mom could have taken me to any kind of computer or programming class at the local community college, that would have been huge. Computer class in school was mostly typing, Oregon Trail and putting any kids who tried to run BASIC, go online, or bring programs from home into detention. Of course, we played pranks like swapping CTRL and ALT on the IBM keyboards, or running the PEEK/POKE command on the Apples to change the refresh rate of the monitor.

dkarl 5y ago
I was in the same boat. I didn't even use PEEK and POKE because the manual I had warned that if you messed up you could render the computer inoperable. In retrospect they probably meant that you might lose some work and need to reboot, or at worst ruin a disk, but I was afraid I might mess up the computer and not be able to fix it, which in our case would mean we simply wouldn't have a computer anymore. It would have been nice to have somebody there to say, don't worry, because if you mess up, we can fix it.
jose-cl 5y ago
I was like 10 years old when my dad "stole" from his job an abandoned olivetti m19. Gorillas was there, but didn't work due to a graphic card issue. So I edited the code, deleting all the block related with the error (was a big 'if') and the game worked. I felt very smart that day
abecedarius 5y ago
Did you try the library? I wonder if I was unusually fortunate in what I could find there. In the 80s Byte had a lot of pointers too, though 90s Byte was just another consumer tech rag.
- bluedino 5y ago
  That's where I got the books. I did find a Pascal book (but of course it was vanilla Pascal and not the Turbo Pascal compiler I got ahold of), and a Microsoft BASIC book but it didn't cover anything I was interested in (mostly games/graphics).
  - abecedarius 5y ago
    There were quite a few games books in the 80s, but mostly basic things in BASIC, yeah.

dkarl 5y ago

I was in the same boat. I didn't even use PEEK and POKE because the manual I had warned that if you messed up you could render the computer inoperable. In retrospect they probably meant that you might lose some work and need to reboot, or at worst ruin a disk, but I was afraid I might mess up the computer and not be able to fix it, which in our case would mean we simply wouldn't have a computer anymore. It would have been nice to have somebody there to say, don't worry, because if you mess up, we can fix it.

jose-cl 5y ago

I was like 10 years old when my dad "stole" from his job an abandoned olivetti m19. Gorillas was there, but didn't work due to a graphic card issue. So I edited the code, deleting all the block related with the error (was a big 'if') and the game worked. I felt very smart that day

abecedarius 5y ago

Did you try the library? I wonder if I was unusually fortunate in what I could find there. In the 80s Byte had a lot of pointers too, though 90s Byte was just another consumer tech rag.

bluedino 5y ago
That's where I got the books. I did find a Pascal book (but of course it was vanilla Pascal and not the Turbo Pascal compiler I got ahold of), and a Microsoft BASIC book but it didn't cover anything I was interested in (mostly games/graphics).
- abecedarius 5y ago
  There were quite a few games books in the 80s, but mostly basic things in BASIC, yeah.