Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)

I had the unfashionable but actually pretty cool Amstrad CPC464. I wanted to play games but also program. Hacking games was also much fun: figuring out how to give yourself 100 lives and so on.

Many weekends were spent typing lines and lines of code to make simple games. Then we'd save stuff to tape - after we'd spent hours and hours debugging, of course.

Elite occupied me for months. Then Forest at World's End, which I mapped out on a bunch of sheets of A4 taped together.

When I got older I hacked my joystick port and connected it to a water chaos wheel I'd made out of an old bicycle rim and some other bits, then I wrote a BASIC program to visualise the movement of the wheel, monitoring direction via the hacked joystick port.

Oh man. Fun, fun times :-)

Looks like this is the one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_the_Z80

My high school in Norway used TI-84+ in the math classes and exams.

Me and a friend in my math class spent a lot of time writing programs in TI-BASIC.

One of my “proudest” creations was an implementation of Snake. My version of Snake has a particularity to it tough. The features I was using to keep track of segments of the snake were slow to access, and the slowness increased with more data.

So whereas the real snake goes faster and faster over time to make it harder and harder, my snake went slower and slower. And when the snake in my game reached a certain length, the game crashed :p

But that’s ok, I had a lot of fun anyways. My version of snake did not need to be perfect. I liked to play it anyways.

I also transferred my Snake game to the calculators of some other people in my classes so that they could play it too. I don’t remember if that was a case of other people asking for a copy of the Snake game I’d made, or if it was more like me convincing others to allow me to put a copy of the game on their calculator. I like to think it was the former, but it is just as likely that it was the latter :p

> the fact that if you POKE some address and the screen changes color doesn't tell you anything about how it all happened.

Simply typing in a PEEK or a POKE may not have told you much about how it happened, but peel back that one layer and you are learning about how memory is organized, hardware registers, and other low level fun. Peel that back another layer and you are starting to learn about EE.

Contrast that to today. Chances are that you are going to have to peel back several layers before you even bump into the OS kernel. Depending upon the language and the libraries, few of those layers will say anything meaningful about how the computer works. Things progress somewhat more rapidly after that, in the sense that each layer of abstraction will be more meaningful, but you will still have to peel back multiple layers before you touch hardware.

I don't think the article was saying that you automatically learned more about computers through the simplicity of older systems. I think they were saying that it was much more accessible to those who decided to do so.

It may have been possible to use them as an API, but it was different in the sense that you were interacting with the hardware directly. There were some nasty consequences to that (it was difficult to maintain compatibility between hardware models, nevermind hardware vendors). There were also some cool consequences to that (you could bend the hardware to do a lot of undocumented stuff).

That said, even firmware calls (the closest thing to a modern software API) were a different beast back then. You could buy documented assembly dumps of the ROM for some computers. Not only was it useful for figuring out how things worked, but you could figure out alternate entry points to use that firmware in undocumented ways.