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Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

'Sometimes I listen to software developers, and I get a little bit angry. I want to ask them "Why are you trying to kill this product? Is there not enough installed base to support your efforts?"

Oh boy Rich... posterity has given you an answer!

Edit: There is a review later on, however, that was fun. A game called Trap! could be sped up by poking memory.

And then I got to the file listings... some of the programs you literally entered in machine code! How did people ever find the time?!

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Does your smarphone give you a weekly report on how many hours per day you're using it? Back in the day we had at least that much time :)

Typing in those hex bytes didn't actually take that long. The worst part was making a data entry mistake. Later "versions" of the listings had a checksum for every line, but the earlier ones didn't. Finding where you typed "6E" instead of "6F" could be a real chore.

There was no internet to waste time on, and many of us didn't have cable TV.

Exactly so as a 10-12 yr old it was kind of either read physical encyclopedias, do random prank calls from white pages, or hack around on your Atari 400/C64/NES/Amiga.. (well I guess or go skateboarding)

I miss my childhood :(

Basically all this, including the pranks too. I fondly remember the huge encyclopedia my great-grandmother (!) offered us.

And the BMX 2000 too: geez, I loved that thing (but was still jealous of that one guy in the neighbourhood on a golden Raleigh Burner).

8-11 year old me made the time because after the sticker shock of two video games, my parents learned about and got me a subscription to Compute! I also spent the summer gathering up bottles and doing odd tasks so that I could afford to get a disk drive because my siblings kept stealing my tapes to record songs off the radio.

You could've stopped them by breaking off the plastic covering the read-only hole, it would have prevented writing to the tape. And, then when you were using the tape and wanted to write to it you could cover it with adhesive to make it writable again. As long as they weren't aware they could do the same, your tapes would have been safe. Because, the moment they went to record over it they'd think the tapes were defective or not compatible.

Pretty much every kid of that era knew they could make it writeable again with some tape though.

> some of the programs you literally entered in machine code! How did people ever find the time?!

IIRC there was a program in BASIC you had to run to start the machine language prompt. Entering lines basically involved typing a series of numbers and their checksum. If you entered the line without errors, a bell sound would play. Otherwise you would hear a buzzing sound.

I knew how to touch type and would just treat the number row on the keyboard as the home row. It was actually faster to transcribe the machine code due to the checksum feature compared to BASIC code.

Looking back on it, I wish they would have just had the program listings in assembly language instead of machine code. That would have made it easier to follow along.

Probably because there was no web to surf...

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