Back in the day computer mags had 20-liner competitions. The objective was to cram as much functionality into 20 lines of BASIC and people did amazing stuff wit

Back in the day computer mags had 20-liner competitions. The objective was to cram as much functionality into 20 lines of BASIC and people did amazing stuff with that. To use the space as best as possible lines were filled to brim and BASIC commands abbreviated. PRINT was ? and other command abbreviations contained PETASCII characters that don't even have a Unicode equivalent[1]. The Commodore 64 particularly had square[2] 8x8 pixel characters and a line on the screen was 40 of them in a row. A logical line from the BASIC interpreter's perspective was still 80 characters long though, which made the program effectively 40 screen lines high. You see, where this is going. The perfect 20-liner was close to a 40 by 40 square of character salad. [1] They were one letter and a shifted letter, which could be displayed as symbol depending which mode you were in. They were printed expanded when listing the program. Everything was a bit complicated. [2] Almost. Pixels were not perfectly square, with the aspect ratio depending on PAL or NTSC.