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Huh, we used to type in BASIC programs from magazines back in the 1980s and I don’t ever recall seeing any kinds of checksum. We would often resort to printing
by pimlottc 2y ago
Huh, we used to type in BASIC programs from magazines back in the 1980s and I don’t ever recall seeing any kinds of checksum. We would often resort to printing out the code and visually comparing line by line against the magazine.
- mrandish 2y agoIn the early 80s I never saw checksums on code listings but by the mid-80s it was fairly common, although certainly not universal.
- kenjackson 2y agoChecksums became popular at some point in the 80s. I remember when COMPUTE! first added them they were a godsend. Especially for the machine language programs that were just pages of data statements.
- arp242 2y agoThe first edition of MSX Computer Magazine from 1985 has them, and I doubt they were the first or invented it: https://www.msxcomputermagazine.nl/archief/bladen/msx_computer_magazine_01.pdf#page=19 https://www.msxcomputermagazine.nl/archief/bladen/msx_comput... Perhaps it was less common in other countries? Things were a lot less global back then and things operated more on a local level.
- pimlottc 2y agoWe mostly had Family Computing magazine. I looked up an issue from 1985 with one of my favorite type-by-hand games, Hit or Miss [0], and no sight of a helpful checksum. To be honest, the idea of it would have blown my mind back then; the idea that your BASIC code is just a text file that can be processed by other programs is something that would never have occurred to me. https://archive.org/details/FamilyComputingIssue041983Dec/Family_Computing_Issue_23_1985_Jul/page/n53/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/FamilyComputingIssue041983Dec/Fa...