Comment by throwaway71271 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway71271 | Hacker News Reader

offtopic:

There is a link to the article LOGiN magazine from 1987: https://archive.org/details/login-may-1987/LOGiN%20-%20May%2...

Around page 318 you can see some games https://archive.org/details/login-may-1987/LOGiN%20-%20May%2...

I just love this way of sharing software, not sure why, because it seems super tedious to write 20 pages of line numbered basic, but in the same time it seems freeing, as you can change it as you write it, and the interaction between the user and the program seems very intimate.

Maybe if we went the lisp way this would've been more possible to just change the software you use, kind of like pico8 (https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php) where you just hit escape and you can edit the lua code.

Somehow personal computing became not personal at all.

I learned programming from these magazines. It's the ultimate open source, as the code was generally small enough that you had a shot of understanding every single line. Sometimes the code listing was documented in the article, which explained how the implementation worked, rather than just explaining what the application does.

The Japanese did these "type-in" source code listings really well, much better than I saw growing up in England. They eventually adopted entering complicated listings as hex code with checksums, which was both faster and less error prone but of course less readable. The bootstrap code would spit out the line where the error was when the checksum failed and you could easily correct in small groups.

I didn‘t have a C64 when I was growing up, but I think there were a lot of magazines for the C64 with code in their issues and I imagine it must have been thrilling to type it out and understand it in the process.

Example: http://www.homecomputerworld.at/magazine/64er/64er_sonderhef...

Yeah, in Germany you had Happy Computer as well as 64er with monthly (or was it weekly?) listings of games and utilities.

Things like that were in my dad's PC magazines; I tried to do it once when I was a kid, unsuccessfully of course because I had no idea what I was doing.

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