I had completely forgotten about this. In the early to mid 80s (maybe before and after, but I don’t remember this for a short time in the 80s) computer magazines printed codes for programs. I think they were usually in BASIC. You typed the code into your computer and if you made one tiny error it didn’t work.
"As the popularity of BASIC grew in this period, magazines (such as Creative Computing Magazine in the US) published complete source code in BASIC for games, utilities, and other programs. Given BASIC’s straightforward nature, it was a simple matter to type in the code from the magazine and execute the program. Different magazines were published featuring programs for specific computers, though some BASIC programs were considered universal and could be used in machines running any variant of BASIC (sometimes with minor adaptations). Correcting the publishing errors that frequently occurred in magazine listings was an educational exercise in itself.
BASIC source code was also published in fully-fledged books: the seminal examples being David Ahl’s BASIC Computer Games series.[6][7][8] Later packages, such as Learn to Program BASIC would also have gaming as an introductory focus."
I remember it well. I used to get a magazine (I think it was Run) that had programs in both BASIC and assembly code for Commodore 64. Boy, was it NOT fun to sit there for hours typing in hex numbers and praying that the checksum was correct when you got to the end of the line!
I did get my most-used non-game program from that magazine, though. It was a SID chip editor with a graphic front-end that used a virtual keyboard or a music staff, your option. I had hundreds of songs on 5.4" disks for that computer…
I remember being excited when check sum was added to the end of the line. That was one hell of a way to waste a Sunday. Spend all morning typing in the code, and then get bored with the game in about 20 mins. (At least it seemed that way.)
Ohlordy, do I remember.
I was teaching at a summer language school in Switzerland and they had all these brand, spanking new Apple computers.
We bought several of those types of magazines, photocopied a few of the better games and gizmos, and had the kids type in the code.
They would spend hours/days typing in code so they could hear primitive beeps and see doodads fly across the screen and play variations of Pong with different objects.
Actually, the kids liked it - it was a great learning experience to ensure you got every single line of code exact, and then the satisfaction of knowing you programmed your own game from scratch.
It was, however, a pain in the ass to teach as some poor kid would do 1000+ lines of code and forget a stupid semi-colon and it wouldn’t work. Had to go through it all to see where he screwed up. And yes, the code was all BASIC.
In order to avoid typing in a lot of code and having to get it right, a friend and I devised a barcode that programs could be printed in, which we called “Bytewrite.” One or two quick swipes with a hand wand reader would enter the program accurately, 254 bytes at a time (8-bit code and a checksum). It worked very well, and even poor printing provided reliable data entry.
255 bytes may not seem like a lot, but few published programs were much longer. Floppies, the least expensive data storage medium, were relatively expensive compared to a sheet of paper, so the need was there.
It never caught on, for a number of reasons. Floppies became cheaper, programs became longer, and barcode wands didn’t become standard equipment on computers as we had hoped.
When I was 10 or 11 a friend and I found BASIC code in some magazine for a text adventure game ala Zork. It used a read-data “engine,” rather than countless if-then statements, which was revolutionary to us at the time. I literally got years of enjoyment out of that algorithm, always trying to improve upon it, creating countless games… good times.
Ahh the bad old days! Compute!s Gazette for me (C64 stuff mostly), and I remember RUN as well as Compute (and the others).
It’s quite amazing to me that I looked forward to the new issue and would go and type in the stuff from the magazines, rarely learning much, and often not even enjoying the programs a lot. I eventually got my parents to buy me a subscription to the floppy edition that would come out in concert with the magazine – I want to say it was $40/year or so, which was a lot of money back then, especially to a punk kid like me. This was probably 1984?
Ah, the joy of my first modem! A VICMODEM, switchable 110/300 baud IIRC. Go CompuServe and Dow Jones! Wheee! I think it cost $90, and we bought it at Hudson’s, the big department store in town.
There were also cassette tapes. I had a TI994/A that had a cartridge reader AND it also ran a cassette drive. Some programs took both kinds. I played a lot of Tunnels of Doom and Steve Adams Adventures.
I also spent a lot of time typing in programs from magazines. This did a LOT to improve my typing speed and accuracy, especially for numbers, much more than my typing classes ever did. I will say that the typing classes enabled me to learn touch typing, and I’m glad of that. But I just plain didn’t spend enough time actually typing when I was in high school. The classes were, IIRC, about 55 minutes long, and about half of that was spent on office procedures, things like how to staple papers together, how to assemble a carbon pack (for all you spoiled younguns, a carbon pack is a sheet of typing paper, a sheet of carbon paper, and a sheet of typing paper again, always starting and ending with a sheet of typing paper), and how to unjam the keys of the typewriter when some idjit had jammed them. So we had between 25 and 30 minutes a day, five days a week, of actually typing. But when I got my computer, I’d spend at least a couple of full hours a day, every day, typing, and I didn’t have to worry about a teacher catching my mistakes. The computer WOULD catch my mistake, and it wouldn’t helpfully point out what was wrong, either.
I remember typing these things. And I remember being really, really mad once where I typed one on my father’s Amstrad and not on my C64. It didn’t work (since it was C64 BASIC, I suppose) and I had spent hours typing and proofreading. In fact, I’m still a bit pissed about it now.
Compute’s Gazette! had that program, MLX, you’d type in a crapload of numbers into, and you’d end up with stuff like DEMONS49152 or an Eliza-type program, AVAIL.
Ah yes, I remember the VICmodem. I ran up a nice bill on Compuserve, and wrote a telecomm program in BASIC which I compiled for speed. I had a nice collection of TRANSACTOR magazines I was just thinking about the other day. I finally threw them out about 10 years ago, more than 10 years after they’d become useless. I miss them though. My friend and I used to make trips to a magazine stand in an otherwise useless mall when a new issue was due. Later, when I moved, I found out a local porno/magazine shop sold it, so when I was in high school, I’d gather up my courage and go in, JUST TO BUY A COMPUTER MAGAZINE. Yeah, I have geek cred.
I also wrote a pretty decent disk organizing program (and a really slow file copier to go with it) that I no longer have a copy of. I don’t have a c64 anymore either, so it wouldn’t get used, but it seems a shame to not have a copy of it.
True, but a cassette was 100 times more expensive than a sheet of paper, and there was a severe lack of standards for the data reading/writing. Remember the Penney’s cassette deck that sometimes worked?
And a paper program could be faxed. I don’t remember when I got my first fax machine, but it might have been about that time (early 1980s?).
I had the first one of those. More often than not, you’d spend hours typing the code in, then when you went to run it it’d fail, and you’d have to spend more hours trying to hunt down the one little typo that killed the whole thing. Not that much different from modern programming, I suppose.
When I had a C64 I was using a word processor that I had gotten from either Run or Compute!s Gazette. IIRC it was so long that it was actually spread over several issues of the magazine, and every so often afterward they would print changes to the program to add more functions.
