Ah the 70’s. Basic and the mass of Basic games: typed in, shared, improved upon. All those super star treks…. And Life, something that consumed a fair bit of

Ah the 70’s. Basic and the mass of Basic games: typed in, shared, improved upon. All those super star treks…. And Life, something that consumed a fair bit of printer paper and could be done in any language. Might have been more Life implementations than Star Trek. Chess (and checker) programs, which was often an introduction to assembly language but it could be done in Fortran. And the pdp-8 that got computing “small” - you could do a lot in a trivial amount of memory if you worked at it. The biggest difference was that the size and relative scarcity of computers and terminals made things social. Learning and showing, having one’s rough edges ground down a bit in order to get on the schedule. The whole “we did x, so maybe we can do y” hacking approach. It’s liberating not knowing what can’t be done.