Arctic Adventure: A lost 1981 TRS-80 adventure game by Harry McCracken
arctic81.com
arctic81.com
The TRS-80 was my first home computer. I do vividly remembering typing in the whole of Artic Adventure, cursing that I had made a mistake, and painfully checking over every character to find I had put it in identically.
However, bug-checking a typed program was also a common experience. Most of the BASIC games I re-typed from magazines had unplayable flaws in them, so I did actually manage to get it running... Eventually.
The Trash 80s were something we had in school, never at home.
Without that, and the encouragement to experiment on the machine, I very much doubt I would have ended up as a programmer.
Somewhat unrelated to that, after I had learned programming and been to University, the most educational experience I had was re-compiling sources for software on Unix machines that weren't quite mainstream. Porting TeX / LaTeX to a Pyramid was super educational, plus a fascinating insight into the mind of Donald Knuth.
This is very interesting; have you written more about the experience somewhere, or do you remember any more about it?
This was around 1988, 1989 and the Pyramid was already obsolete but the organisation had a huge investment in it as a 100 user machine with serial terminals so we had to make do.
First thing was to get the tangle and weave programs running. The header paths and library locations weren't completely standardised and even the function signatures were different between machines. There was no "configure" back then, so it was a case of digging through the the compile and link errors, fixing what didn't work and trying again. Once tangle and weave were running the job got a bit easier until it came to the PostScript output program which was a bit of a law unto itself, but I might not be recalling that part correctly.
Once the tangle/weave steps started working, the Makefile assembled everything and install from there was fairly simple. The bones of TeX were written in an intermediate language and needed the tangle/weave pair to turn it into something functional. To fix my adaptations required developing a passung knowledge of that intermediate language, which was half comments and half expressive code. Once I got my head around it I thought it was fascinating but not terribly practical. Then again, I'm no Knuth and never built anything as cool as a computer type setter so what do I know.
There were a few times that tangle and weave did something weird, but mostly that was my adapted code not working as expected. A few revisions sorted those out quickly.
This must have been right at the tail of that era of Unix though, the Sun workstations were easy to get TeX and LaTex for pre built.
The learning experience of trawling through include files looking for the right functions and adapting calls to make them work on that Pyramid was invaluable as a developer later on, not for the Pyramid knowledge but as an education into unix.
Now of course you can copy and paste your error into google and likely somebody solved the problem already. Back then we had the include files and occasionally usenet. It wasn't necessarily harder to get things done but it required patience and time.
I wish we had the same thing for Python or JavaScript! :D
Try Mission Python - the books assumes you don't know how to program and teaches you Python while building a game.
I had to wait 20 years for the internet and sites that had walkthroughs before I was able to finish that game.
The TRS-80 Model 16 was the fastest-selling UNIX machine of it's time, using Microsoft Xenix on a 68k. Bill Gates mentioned his Xenix sales from time to time in later years.
Microsoft in the 1970s-early 80s was apparently pretty amazing: bringing BASIC to inexpensive PCs, CP/M to the Apple II, and UNIX to your local electronics/stereo/toy shop (RIP RadioShack.) Their logo was cool back then too.
I guess it's not surprising then for Microsoft to offer WSL/ Ubuntu for Windows!
We're pretty lucky to have Linux (and BSD Unix) on a $35 Raspberry Pi, but it's basically a (much) tinier, cheaper, and more powerful version of what you could get at Radio Shack in 1983. (Reading the specs, apparently you could add up to 9 serial terminals to it in addition to the built-in console!)
(Xenix could run on Apple's Lisa as well, but the Lisa was more expensive and presumably its primary appeal was the Lisa Office System rather than Unix.)
Shame that Xenix PCs died out in the 1980s, really. I imagine an alternate universe where Apple and Radio Shack sold UNIX/Xenix "workstations" in the 1990s, with LisaOS X and Microsoft Windows for Xenix.