A Program from a 35 Year Old Magazine for BASIC Month and a Chat with Its Author

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.... 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.

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...

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.

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.

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 (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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.