
A Program from a 35 Year Old Magazine for BASIC Month and a Chat with Its Author - janvdberg
http://www.bytecellar.com/2017/10/03/a-program-from-a-35-year-old-magazine-for-basic-month-and-a-chat-with-its-author/
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drallison
At the People's Computer Company (PCC) we published many BASIC (and other
programs) beginning in the early 1970s in a number of publications: PCC
Newspaper, Personal Computing, Recreational Computing, and Doctor Dobb's
Journal. We also ran storefront computer facilities where people (kids and
adults) could rent time on a TTY connected to a computer. Most of the
computers we used for that were DEC PDP-8s.

One of our most popular books was _What to Do After You Hit Return_ ,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_to_Do_After_You_Hit_Retur...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_to_Do_After_You_Hit_Return).
It remains, to this day, a classic.

Typing in a program from a magazine or book was always a crapshoot unless you
really understood and could change the program simply because of the large
number of different dialects of BASIC.

Microsoft BASIC eventually became a "standard" of sorts, but that was later.

~~~
hnlmorg
I hated Mircosoft BASIC in the 80s. Platforms like the C64 had widespread
appeal but the BASIC it shipped always felt backwards compared to other micro
computers I used in that era. But then we were spoilt in the UK with the likes
of BBC BASIC (Acorn - the same company that gave us the ARM CPU) and
Locomotive BASIC (Amstrad).

~~~
Narishma
That's more on Commodore than Microsoft. They kept using the cheap bare-bones
Microsoft BASIC license they got for the original PET on all their subsequent
computers even though later versions were much better.

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13of40
If I were somehow transported back to 1983 in front of my TI/99-4a... I'd run
outside to smell the grass, then head up the hill with some friends in tow to
sit among the oak trees and talk about dragons and fairy lands, and only after
the sun was solidly beyond the horizon and we'd eaten our ice cream and I'd
let my father beat me in chess, would I lay out the list of companies he
needed to invest in. I'd watch him prosper from afar until I was able to wedge
my foot in solidly at IBM/MS and tell old Mr. Gates to open his eyes (and
wallet) to make those dinosaurs at IBM look into what they were doing with the
Amiga and Atari ST. I would drive broadband-over-cable while people were still
using it to watch soft core skin flicks on Showtime, I'd show people how to
implement Deflate and kick the mouse out of petek's hand before he added
macros to word documents. I'd...

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ilamont
There are lots of people like this with fascinating stories to tell about
being the first programmer or systems specialist at a company back in the 70s
or 80s or early 90s. Sometimes people share their stories right here on HN and
they are always a joy to read (well, at least for me). So many internal and
external dynamics at the companies as they transitioned to using software,
databases, etc. For the people running the tech, there were huge challenges,
yet there were also opportunities to grow.

Incidentally, I used to try out some of the BASIC programs in the magazines
(usually the shorter ones) on my VIC 20 but I rarely got them to work. Not
sure if that was a result of a typo on the printed page, or a typo on my
screen, but when I did get something to run, it really felt like an
accomplishment.

~~~
tluyben2
Because I was young and did not have much pocket money, I would get only the
cheap magazines which were written, printed and carefully stapled by a bunch
of volunteers. They usually had unclear characters, so you had to debug it.
Which was annoying then, but great in hindsight.

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feintruled
Typing BASIC from magazines was one thing, I also remember the densely packed
pages of hexadecimal that you had to type in for the machine code programs.
(Each line checksummed to try to catch mistakes - I remember as a terribly
naive 10 year old thinking I had invented a way of only having to type in the
checksum to enter the program!)

I also enjoyed being reminded of the incredibly hyperbolic write-ups the
magazines used to give the games (you can see the one for the article in the
photo). You would read lurid tales of battles against space aliens, then you'd
type it in and it would be guiding an ASCII character through a maze with the
slow as molasses reponse time that was the hallmark of 8-bit BASIC.

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robterrell
Coincidentally, I recently located my first published BASIC game in an 80's
magazine, on archive.org: [https://archive.org/details/1984-12-compute-
magazine](https://archive.org/details/1984-12-compute-magazine) (page 79 if
you're truly curious)

Back in that era I worked for Compute! magazine as an "editorial programmer".
People would submit BASIC games to the magazine for some particular 8-bit
micro (as in the linked story above), and it was the job of the editorial
programmers to port the game to other computers. I did the Apple ][ ports. I
got the job (high school, so after school) through a friend who did the C64
ports.

~~~
blakespot
I miss reader service cards. :-/

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velcrovan
My place of employment still runs on BASIC. Inventory management, shipping,
order processing, invoicing, accounting, purchase orders. It's kind of a
nightmare. It works. But, it's a nightmare.

~~~
kwhitefoot
Is it a nightmare because of Basic or because of the development and
maintenance practices?

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kcmastrpc
i feel really bad now, i'm pretty sure i pirated his bbs software.

~~~
js2
He just purchased an airport, so I think he did okay anyway. But you could
always retroactively donate the money to a charity in his name.

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leoferres
Huh. I did the same a few weeks ago on a TS1500, my first computer :)
[https://youtu.be/aHXDAOv8AQA](https://youtu.be/aHXDAOv8AQA)

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sunnyP
This is amazing. I can remember typing in that program in the 80s.

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mgregory22
I totally remember that article and how pissed I was that I didn't have the
extended basic cartridge. I loved that magazine, though.

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willbw
Great read. I really enjoy hearing people's career stories, it is interesting
where you can end up after 35 years of work.

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jlebrech
I'd like to see basic (or equivalent) for simple logic, but have the OO and
more advanced techniques offset to another language. something simpler than
lua, maybe similar to sql.

~~~
dragonbonheur
Like GAMBAS and FreeBASIC, even VB.net ?

[http://gambaswiki.org/wiki/def/class](http://gambaswiki.org/wiki/def/class)

[https://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11804](https://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11804)

