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I remember the words "peeking" and "poking", but this may have been specific to basic.
by Yoric 5mo ago
I remember the words "peeking" and "poking", but this may have been specific to basic.
- zabzonk 5mo agoYes, most Basics had peek and poke commands with which you could read and write specific memory locations. For example - parentheses may or may net be needed, depending on the Basic implementation: X = PEEK( 123 ) would read the byte at memory location 123 and store its value in X. Then POKE( 123, 42 ) would change the byte at 123 to be 42. But these didn't normally have so much to do with patching executables to add/change functionality.
- chorizo 5mo agoThat unlocked a memory of me seeing my computer lab teacher after class in 5th or 6th grade to ask her about the applications of PEEK and POKE. I’d picked up a copy of the GW-BASIC manual from a used bookstore. She’d never heard of those commands. Ended up promptly locking up one of the school computers by poking random numbers to random addresses.
- ale42 5mo agoI remember looking into BASIC sources to figure out how they did some things I had no idea how to do with BASIC... and finding POKE statements with weird numbers, it was looking a bit like magic... (I was probably 10 or so, though)