20 GOTO 10: 10101001 facts about retro computers (book) | Hacker News Reader

20 GOTO 10: 10101001 facts about retro computers (book)

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55 pointswkjagt14 comments

The extra 8kB was done to make a Spanish tax on home computers with 64kB of memory not apply to the 472. There was otherwise no difference with the 464.

The extra 8kb wasn't even usable.

Noel’s Retro Lab did a video on it a couple of years ago if you’re into that sort of thing: https://youtu.be/_ErfWfjN9iU

[Book author here]

If you have questions about the contents of the book, it's inception, etc, then feel free to ask.

(I also spoke about the book at the computer museum in Cambridge, so this video might give you some background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15cC6hq66I0)

If you have questions about the book itself, ask the publisher!

Was the book’s title at all inspired by or an homage to the series 1 title sequence to “Look Around You”?

No - it came from the line of code that everyone liked to type into computers at the local shop:

10 PRINT "My mate is an idiot "; 20 GOTO 10

I suspect they were inspired from the same events.

Old thread now - but I just got this book and it's made my day! I'm of that vintage where my first coding was on a friends Nascom I (not mentioned in the book) but I really cut my teeth on the school's commodore Pet!

I remember looking at adverts for the SCMP and the MK14 with envy tho!

Great Read

Thank you - and you're welcome! :)

Is there a sample chapter?

There's a sample for Kindle on Amazon.

Imagine someone buys the book and after finishing it they are like, “wait, where are the remaining 10 100 832 facts?”

I think they’ll either error out or get stuck in an infinite loop on the 20 GOTO 10 before.

Unless the author shoehorned some if/then>goto into 11-19

It mentions something like that in the introduction. It's like a choose your own adventure kind of book. There are also Easter eggs that no other chapters point to, so you have to find them in a different way. It also says you'll sometimes reach a dead end, in which case you'll have to backtrack and choose a different path. There are also subroutine chapters that end with a return instead of a list of next chapters.

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