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Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era

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Re: Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era

#11

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

raegis wrote: post #4
evolve2k wrote: post #2

For a few years now I’ve been teching my son to code. This feels like a good project to do together. Grab one of these games understand it in basic and then reimplement it using my fav language. Any other parents out there teaching their kids/teens/young adults to code?

I bought a programming magazine in the 1980s and copied a game to my Commodore 128. It didn't work, and I failed to debug it, so I set the magazine aside and starting writing my own games. In retrospect I think it was a great educational lesson. My first attempt to copy/paste code was a complete failure, so I was forced to think up stuff on my own. Man, youngsters nowadays can copy/paste in milliseconds, whereas back…

Most the haves I typed from magazines never worked. It was pretty discouraging to spend so much time typing and then the disappointment. Glad to hear I was not alone because most people in this thread seem to have been successful. Maybe it was because the size of the games in this book were small. The programs I typed from magazines were pages and pages.

Re: Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era

#12

Post by pvg »

timbit42 wrote: post #9
jkronstat wrote: post #5

I was introduced to programming by the book that came with The Apple IIGS, "A Touch of Applesoft Basic." http://www.apple2.pl/books/applesoft.pdf I've always wondered if it was one of the most influential books, ever. It certainly influenced me!

To be influential, it would help if it were sold with one of the most popular systems. There were only around 1.7 million Apple IIgs systems sold. The Commodore 64 sold the most systems but so many owners only played games on it that the manual probably wasn't the most influential book on BASIC. Exempting system manuals, the BASIC Computer Games books were probably it.

These books (and their earlier versions) came with most Apple ][s, probably just about all that were sold in educational settings. Unlike BASIC Computer Games, they taught programming - something BASIC Computer Games (also a great and influential book) didn't.

Re: Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era

#13

Post by mech422 »

Personally, Compute! magazine was my goto for games... The fact it autocheck the checksum at the end of each line was a sanity saver!

Anyone else remember the hex code dumps they had for entering/checking machine language programs? I still remember going thru 84 screens of the stuff to get an awesome monitor program with assembly/disassembly functionality!

Re: Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era

#14

Post by ijidak »

> bear in mind these are very primitive games from the 1970s. They aren't going to win any awards for gameplay, or programming sophistication

This is where I feel sad for today's kids.

The pressure to make a great game was lower back then.

Programming felt like an amazing accomplishment very quickly.

Now, kids feel like they've accomplished very little, even though they're doing more with less code than we did during our generation.

Miss those days.

Re: Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era

#16

Post by sbuttgereit »

gumby wrote: post #15

I still have my copy, the original DEC edition. Dave Ahl was one of my heroes back then.

Same here, though my copy is in abysmal condition. Between this book and the 80s era enthusiast magazines that had delivered their code directly on the printed page I learned how to program and not be fearful of programming. I have to say that calling Ahl's book the most influential BASIC book sounds like a very feasible claim.

Re: Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era

#17

Post by oddthink »

Wow. These books were, well, foundational to me. I had a blast typing those into my C64. Then at a summer camp (CTY at F&M) I thought I was so very clever for writing a version of Nim where the computer would silently pick to go first or second so that it always won. I don't know why I still remember that.

And then some summer jobs writing dBase III and FoxPro, some actual education, and here I am.

Those books absolutely set the tone and sparked that first interest.

Re: Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era

#18

Post by musicale »

It would be nice to do a few things with these classic and influential games (isn't the original BASIC version of The Oregon Trail in there?):

- Update them with the minimal changes required to run on a modern-ish Microsoft(style) BASIC.

- Rewrite them in a modern beginner-friendly(ish) language like Python. (This seems to be what the author wants to do.)

- Create (hopefully) easy-to-understand JavaScript versions that can be run in a web browser.

- Create an compatible BASIC interpreter that can run them as-is in a web browser.

- Create modern-ish versions of the games with pixel graphics where appropriate.

- Create some new, simple but interesting and fun, modern-style games in a modern language/environment, to serve a similar purpose for current generations of computing enthusiasts and people who haven't discovered the fun of simple programming.

Re: Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era

#20

Post by kingcharles »

I distinctly remember my first program as a five-year-old child:

10 PRINT "CHAZ WOZ ERE "

20 GOTO 10

In the UK one of the main retailers of 8bit computers was Boots the Chemist. This store is functionally equivalent to America's CVS or Walgreens (who know owns a big chunk of Boots). They would have all the computers on shelves hooked up to TVs. And of course, almost all computers of the day would boot into BASIC.

My Mum would leave me in Boots in front of the computers while she went around town for hours doing the shopping each week and I would happily learn programming, picking up new ideas from older teenagers who would be happy to show off their superior coding skills.

It would be three years until my parents could buy me a Spectrum of my own. In that time before I had my own, my Dad would pick up the occasional computer book from a second-hand store and I would read technical manuals and programming books cover-to-cover in my bedroom, having to imagine the output in my head.

Those were the days!

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