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Comment by drallison | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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.

"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."

Which is how lots of us learned to program.

My biggest learning experience was translating a program from Pascal to BASIC; it seemed like a fairly simple translation, but it just wouldn't work. I finally realized the massive difference between GOSUB and a function call. I ended up having to implement my own stack to make things work.

> 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.

The books I remember from my childhood largely countered this by putting asterisks next to certain lines of a listing:

* For ZX Spectrum change to ...

* For C64 change to ..

I still, vividly, remember the covers of the books I borrowed from my local library. Now available for free here (scroll down to "Usborne 1980s computer books"):

https://usborne.com/browse-books/features/computer-and-codin...

Yes, I remember being frustrated trying to get magazine games to work on my Apple II with Integer BASIC (or Applesoft BASIC if I spent several minutes to load it in on cassette tape). However, I learned a lot trying to debug these games and get them to work. Sometimes I was successful and that was very rewarding. Things definitely got easier once I got an Applesoft ROM card and Microsoft BASIC became more standard.

Read about your group in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Has been a while but I recall you had a sort of social networking and classifieds piece of the store front project?

I do recall from days past that some of the content came of the Keiwit games scodelib :-) Too bad Bridge never got ported, that game smacked the crap out of my Dad :-)

I loved that book! My dad's computer store stocked it continuously for years. And Dr Dobb's of course.

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