Hacker News Reader

Comment by ansible | Hacker News Reader

While I don't mean to slight the front-end dev's dedication, there are more than a few of us who learned BASIC programming in the late 1970's and early 1980's... without access to any computing device at all.

We would study BASIC from manuals and other books, and pour over program listings in magazines. Then we would write out programs on paper, and "interpret" them in our heads to see if they worked correctly.

Some home computers like the Timex / Sinclair were relatively inexpensive ($100 USD in 1981, $330 in today's dollars), they weren't cheap even then, and that was the very lowest-end device possible (4Kbytes RAM, no storage whatsoever). An Apple II with a floppy drive and montior would run into the thousands of dollars back then.

View on HN

When I first got my hands on a computer late 90s, other people should have seen my fathers facial expression when he saw his 10 year old son typing "weird code" into a terminal window at a "lightning" 1-2chars/sec speed :) I didn't have the pocket money to buy expensive foreign computer magazines, so I was studying at the book store when we went to the mall.

People all complain that the hardware is too closed these days, but I get emotional when I see kids having access to such inexpensive hardware. Amazing times.

Early 80s?? We were doing that stuff up to the mid 00s in my school. Honestly I found it extremely unappealing because you could not get the result immediately, but in the long run, it helps to think about the working logic behind codes instead of simply shooting in the dark and debugging.

I have a similar history. What amazes me is that I used to write in assembly language for the Z80, plugging in the hex machine code numbers inline into BASIC and Turbo Pascal programs, and I never saw an assembly manual, instruction list or book, and never had an assembler! Somehow picked up instructions one at a time from magazine columns, wrote assembly on paper and hand-translated into machine code. It's such a different world now, being able to order online, if not download instantly, just about everything. I came across Rodney Zaks' Programming the Z80 about 10 years ago in a second hand shop and it was like seeing the Holy Grail—a legendary book I never imagined I'd ever see a copy of, much less own.

I learned BASIC and bash from library books as late as the early 90s.

Nowhere near as good as the real thing, but I remember loving it nonetheless.

I have difficulties understanding this. I learned Basic ard 84 on a c64. I don't understand why anybody would learn it without access to any device. I mean what would even get one interested in it/how would one know this exists?

Having grown up in communist Romania, I had this experience - the first computer I toyed with was a Spectrum clone, which we had at the school, and had access to it for about 2h/week. I definitely knew what it is and how to use it, but I couldn't spend time actually developing even simple programs on it.

So I had a copied manual at home, and a couple of magazines with listings, and I would write my programs in basic on paper, and emulate them in my head, to verify they work. Then when I had access to the computer at the school I would use that time to type in the program and really run it.

Thankfully my parents were able to buy for my own Spectrum clone after a while (when they become cheaper/more affordable, because the PCs finally were being imported, so a lot of local companies would move from their Spectrums to PCs) and then I could spend innumerable hours building simple move-the-cursors games directly on the hardware.

not long ago I read about it, somehow I was researching about old computers and old games

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15607791

Another commenter in this post

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27904224

> I have difficulties understanding this. I learned Basic ard 84 on a c64. I don't understand why anybody would learn it without access to any device.

You don't understand my youthful obsession with computers? Or you don't understand that my family couldn't afford a C64 when they first came out?

I hopefully don't have to explain the 2nd reason to you.

As for the first, I don't quite know how to explain that. As I learned of what computers where, and how they worked, it just overtook my ambitions in life. Being a firefighter or astronaut could just not compare to being able to command a machine to perform complex tasks at my bidding. I wanted to work on robots, I wanted to make an AI that could converse with me, I wanted to explore strange new worlds, and more.

I understand a youthful obsession and I understand not being able to afford a computer. I can understand if there is a slight access to a computer (either in a shop selling those not minding the kids playing ard, or a distant acquaintance of an uncle allowing for 30 min screen time every month or needing to bribe the grounds keeper for access to the schools it room), but I have a hard time understanding zero access and doing pen and paper programming. I mean why chose basic and not assemble when choosing without a computer.

How did you learn what computers were? Did you see it on a TV show about computers?

Computers weren't new. The idea that an ordinary person might have access to one, or even own one, even if that "ordinary person" wasn't you, was new at the time. And there was more than a little excitement about those turnkey machines you could just buy and use, assuming you had the money. There were books and magazines, educational TV shows, etc. I picked up BASIC long before I ever saw a computer that ran BASIC. (I did have the opportunity to try a little bit of FORTRAN using MarkSense cards on a 1401 in the year before the MIPS Altair 8800 was announced as a kit in Popular Electronics. We'd send the card bundles away, and a couple of weeks later we'd get a printout, usually of syntax errors, along with punched versions of the cards we'd sent off. One would quickly learn to pay a little more attention writing and mentally running code.) With BASIC, it's very easy to picture what's going on without knowing much at all about the hardware. With assembly language, not so much.

I learned BASIC via books myself. I learned about it through the Commodore PET at school and some Apple IIes later on. I didn't have a computer at home, but I'd often write simple little text "games" in BASIC (things where you just enter your name and it asks you questions). I didn't have access to the computers at home all the time, so my situation was not one where I knew I'd get a chance to try it on a computer.

We eventually got a PC at home later on, but I already loved working out programming logic. With the PC, I also remember one time writing up some assembly in the library at school with pen and paper and eventually typing it in when I got home.

I'm aware of this. I'm to understand that Woz wrote Apple Integer BASIC, more or less on paper, before he even built the computers it would run on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com