

Compute! Magazine Archive - shawndumas
http://archive.org/details/compute-magazine

======
mmastrac
My first experiences with computers were typing things in from manuals when I
was six years old. I have a six-year-old now and I don't know how I can give
him the same experience that I had.

Our current attempt is using LEGO Mindstorms - he's become such an adept
builder over the last few years that he can put together pretty complex robots
from instructions without any help. I hope that he can now make the leap to
modifying these creations and hacking his own from scratch. No idea if this
will give him the same rich experience of creation that I had as a youngster,
but I hope so.

Also, see a wonderful Ars story on this:

[http://arstechnica.com/staff/2012/12/first-encounter-
compute...](http://arstechnica.com/staff/2012/12/first-encounter-compute-
magazine-and-its-glorious-tedious-type-in-code/)

~~~
orangethirty
Try the arduino. I have a 7 year old niece who types in arduino programs
without trouble. She even plugs in the different components (with assistance)
into the breadboard. Whatever you do, don't think they can't do it. You would
be surprised.

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WalterBright
I have a complete set of the first 2 years of Creative Computing which I'd
love to scan & put online for free, but there's that dang copyright law.

I think copyrights ought to expire after 20 years.

~~~
EvanAnderson
The Internet Archive has put up a number of issues of Creative Computing
([http://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Acreativecom...](http://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Acreativecomputing))
but it looks like the first 2 years aren't there. If you'd consider sending
them to the Internet Archive I strongly suspect they'd scan and host them.

re: copyright expiration - Absolutely.

~~~
ersii
Oh, the Internet Archive will absolutely scan, host if or when possible and
preserve the original content.

Speaking of the Internet Archive, their fundraiser which is matching every
donation times three is still active - but soon over: Consider helping them
out if you can and like: <http://archive.org/donate/>

------
Sembiance
Several months ago I took all the Compute Gazette and Run magazine issues,
wrote some quick code and created a montage/wallpaper of their covers:

<http://telparia.com/CommodoreMagazineCovers.jpg>

I then wrote some more code to try and find the most colorful game ads from
the pages and came up with these wallpapers:

<http://telparia.com/Commodore_Game_Ads_1.jpg>

<http://telparia.com/Commodore_Game_Ads_2.jpg>

<http://telparia.com/Commodore_Game_Ads_3.jpg>

<http://telparia.com/Commodore_Game_Ads_4.jpg>

<http://telparia.com/Commodore_Game_Ads_5.jpg>

Just thought I would share :)

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IbJacked
I, too, fondly remember reading Compute! and Compute's Gazette from cover to
cover each month when I was a kid, along with long sessions of typing in
programs from the magazine into my C=64.

I remember talking to some adults about Assembly programming, and they were
dumping on my beloved 6510, seemingly surprised anyone could get anything done
with only three registers (A, X, & Y). They were 8086 guys, of course. All I
ever knew at the time was three registers, it never occurred to me other chips
had more. You make do with what you have :)

~~~
csense
I'm under 30, and I'm probably one of the last programmers who learned
assembly language with DOS Debug's 16-bit assembly.

Each register has its own personality: BX is the base, CX is the count, AX is
the accumulator, SI and DI are source/destination indices, BP is the stack
pointer.

If you have a pointer, you want to put it in SI, DI, or BX so you can use a
memory load instruction like MOV AX,[BX]. If you have a pointer and an offset,
you want one of them to be in BX, and the other in either SI or DI -- because
there are instructions MOV AX,[BX+SI] and MOV AX,[BX+DI], but not MOV
AX,[SI+DI].

The x86 16-bit instruction set is full of places where your operands have to
be in certain registers. The REP MOVSB instruction requires five registers to
be initialized; you don't have any choice of which five.

Kids these days and their RISC machines where there are a hundred registers
and they're all the same -- they don't even have names, just numbers. Get off
my lawn!

(Yes, I'm aware that your software can be much more efficient with more
registers, it's a good investment of increased silicon capacity Moore's law
has given us since then, there are fewer compiler writers wandering around who
have been driven insane, etc...but the point is, the constraint satisfaction
process that's part of writing a 16-bit program is rather fun for the
programmer, like Sudoku.)

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Gormo
There are a lot more computer magazines archived there besides Compute!:
<http://archive.org/details/computermagazines>

They've apparently even got the first 16 years of Byte.

Google also has the complete archive of InfoWorld up to 2007 posted:
<http://books.google.com/books/serial/tDcEAAAAMBAJ> (though you'll have to
manually change the "start" parameter in the URL to browse before 1987).

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pgrote
Awesome. Typing in programs from the back of magazines led to my 60+WPM by
high school. I didn't use the home row, so I failed the typing class. lol

When Compute/Compute's Gazette came out with MLX I turned my attention to how
to control a computer at the very basic levels.

Glad to see the archive is alive and available for free. What should I do with
all my old copies now? :)

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locopati
My first word processor - typed in by hand and, at the time, the best one
around that I could afford.

[http://archive.org/stream/1985-03-compute-
magazine/Compute_I...](http://archive.org/stream/1985-03-compute-
magazine/Compute_Issue_058_1985_Mar#page/n123/mode/2up)

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da-bacon
Typing programs in from the magazine taught me how to debug before I ever
learned to program.

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dokidoki
I remember typing pages of numbers... only to find the only program I'm aware
of that doesn't work on a C128 in C64 mode. :( (I think it was a disk copier,
I forget the name)

