There were also a series of books where you are the brilliant young hacker of some international anti-terrorist team and as the story progressed you will be asked to key in programs and modify them to get your team out of some tight spots. The stories included fighting a human computer, investigating a series of brain-washing at an island resort and some other.
I couldn’t remember the name of the series though.
My point was, cassettes were less expensive than floppies. Most people had a cassette player around the house, too, which meant that one didn’t have to shell out Big Bucks for a floppy drive. And floppy drives WERE comparatively expensive back then. A cassette tape with a program on it was less expensive than a floppy disk was, AND it didn’t require another expensive peripheral, AND it was far more convenient than typing in something from a magazine. I don’t believe that I ever had a Penney’s cassette deck…I had one that was pretty reliable.
Oh, the memories… the memory of spending an entire, perfectly fine Sunday afternoon typing in a long program only to have a blackout a few lines before the end. Made me feel like throttling a kitten’s neck.
I had a ZX Spectrum back then, 48kb of memory, cassette player for loading and recording programs. I still can hear in my head the screeching stream of bytes from that thing.
For those of you nostalgic about those old days there are a few online game emulators for the Spectrum (I wouldn’t be surprised it there are others for C64 and other platforms)
Sure. I know you can run QBasic under DOSBox on a modern operating system, but I’m sure there must be other ones. Looks to me from Googling that FreeBasic is the successor to QBasic.
I’m a little weary of the utility of learning BASIC these days. I’m just a hobbyist programmer, but I had to unlearn a lot of crap to bring myself up to speed with more modern languages. I think Python or something of its ilk is a better introduction to coding these days.
Ah yes, I remember it well. In fact, it’s a fine childhood memory. My brother is older than me by about 10 years, and he was getting very much into computers while he was still living at home. We’d stay up all night, with me dictating lines of code to him as he typed. Weird bonding experience? Maybe, but I remember it with pleasure.
I’ve spent many hours typing in code from Compute! magazine. Still have almost every issue in a box somewhere in the storage shed.
Brag time. I actually had a program published once. It was utility that optimized data on a disk for the fastest read time by arranging the data so that when the disk had finished reading and transferring one sector the next sector coming up was the next chunk needed. This was before fastload cartridges.
And for the nostalgic, the Compute! archive.
I remember when the big hoopla was for the Cauzin Soft Strip - a sort of large barcode that you could, oops… uh, anyone got a scanner yet?
Oh well. Nice idea, even if nobody wanted to shell out a couple hundred bucks for the hardware before they knew if the format was going to last.
The data density had to be low to accommodate printing quality issues. I vaguely recall seeing somewhere that one magazine page could hold about 6-8K of data in this format.
I was back home last week helping mom clean out forty years of crap so she can start trying to get the house sold. As we were cleaning out my dad’s old office, she found a sales brochure for the Osborne 1 that my dad bought back in 1980 or so. $1795 for a box with a couple of built in floppy drives and about a four inch display screen in the middle, with detachable keyboard, plus bundled software (OS, WordStar, and SuperCalc). And it was “portable”! The brochure had a picture of a woman in skirt and high heels lugging this box around with a big old smile on her face. It was hilarious.
I have that old Osborne in a closet downstairs. This thread makes me think I should get it out and fire it up when I get home, just to see if it still works.
I have one sitting on my shelf.
Yep, Another Commodore 64 Compute! magazine typist.
And I do remember also doing some for the Timex Sinclair.
Yep, I remember we spent days typing BASIC code into our TI computer. It was supposed to be a game where you moved a long snake around a maze, a little like Centipede. It never worked right, though we went over it with a fine-tooth comb. I can’t remember what magazine it was from–did Omni do that? We used to get Omni, I know.
The most popular way to interface (maybe the only way) a cassette player to a computer was the Tarbell S-100 board. It took quite a bit of playing with levels and trials to get any cassette player to work with it. After failing with two models I had lying around, I broke down and bought the model that Tarbell recommended, the Penney’s $35 unit, probably like everyone else.
Interfacing cassettes to the computer was faaaaar from easy and foolproof and there was no way of controlling the drive transport from the computer. You had to start the player, then start the computer program and hope you did it at the right time and place or you’d rewind and do it again.
You’re right about the cost of floppy drives, tho. The first one I had was a Micropolis dual 5" unit reading hard-sectored, single sided drives and storing 360K per disc. It came with a full-sized S-100 board and cable and cost $1800 for the unit.
Compute’s Gazette let you order shareware programs stuffed onto a disk for very little. Since I actually had a job, this was a lot more cost effective for me than typing.
I converted the Star Trek program in Ahl’s book into Pascal when I was in grad school, where it served as the major test case for our PDP-11 Pascal compiler and the new OS one of my officemates wrote for his dissertation. I still have the code on a DecTape, not that I have a way of reading it besides visiting the Computer Museum.
I had a VIC-20, connected to a small Sears black & white TV. No floppy drive, no tape drive. I would get magazines from the library, and spend all day typing out a game, and then leave the VIC on for several days until I got totally sick of it.
Eventually when I was 9 or so, one of the magazines published the pinout for Commodore’s tape drive connector, since of course they couldn’t just provide a headphone and mic jack like many others did. I didn’t have an allowance or anything to try and order the appropriate card-edge connector from Radio Shack so I set about making my own connector with things I found around the house. Took a bit of index card, taped wires to it in the appropriate spots to mate with the card-edge connector on the VIC. Then secured the whole thing with a binder clip wrapped in electrical tape. It required frequent adjustment but it actually worked. I hooked it up to my dad’s cassette recorder, not sure of the exact model but similar to this: http://img2.mlstatic.com/jm/img?s=MLB&f=138325309_6084.jpg&v=O
Fond memories. Eventually in 6th grade or so we got a Tandy 1000HX. It had a 3.5" floppy. I remember hating the thing, because at our local computer stores, Mac, Amiga, Atari and other software was all on 3.5", but anything for DOS was generally only available on 5.25". We found a store that would transfer software to 3.5" for me, heh. A year or so later I got my first 300bps modem and I was in heaven. 
I used to get 321 Contact magazine in the mid 80s and they had BASIC code in there. Eventually, it got so heavy with the computer stuff that they changed the name to ENTER magazine, or maybe formed a second magazine for the computer stuff.
I can remember sitting there entering code for (what seemed like) hours on my C64 and then my mother would open the freezer and the computer would reboot.
It wasn’t like you could just hit Ctrl-S every few minutes.
You’d find a disk with some space on it, put it into the disk drive, which was the size of a small modern desktop PC.
SAVE “PROGRAM”,8,1
and then listen to the disk drive turn and grind for 20 minutes.
Heh…I had a program once (can’t remember what it was…might have been a game) that had a loading screen that said “Patience is a 1541 disk drive”.
Generally speaking, Commodore always had good interfaces for their stuff. They liked to make “smart” interfaces to ease the burden on the main computer’s cpu.
However, their design for the cassette interface was the worst piece of crap I ever came across in all of my experience with computers. Their idea of error detection was that they stored every program twice. When you loaded a program, it compared the first version with the second one, and if anything was different, it caused the load to fail. So basically, it was twice as slow and half as reliable. What a piece of crap.
The TRS-80’s cassette interface was much better, and for some strange reason, worked best with el-cheapo cassette recorders/players and el-cheapo tapes. The special “computer” version cassette recorder was crap, and on either version, higher quality tapes were more likely to produce errors. Go figure.
To this day, I can still pretty much draw a complete schematic for a Commodore Vic 20 or 64, a TRS-80 Model 1, or an Apple IIe from memory. I wonder how much useful stuff I can’t learn now because my brain is filled with useless old crap like this. 
I loved Creative Computing. In all the years that I have been playing with computers, that is the only magazine that I ever subscribed to.
They ran an article that was titled “A discussion of sorts” about the differences between three major types of sorting algorithms. Clear, concise and even a novice like I was back then could understand it.
Heh.
The one thing I always liked about the 1541 was that when it powered up, it had a pretty cutesy way of figuring out where the head was. It just slammed it up against the left side of the drive as hard as it could (whapp-app-app-app). I suppose that was its “self aligning” procedure as well.
I had two 1541 drives at one point. I remember cutting the tracks on the controller board and wiring up switches which I drilled into the side of the case so that I could select the drive number (8 to 11).
I also had a 300 baud modem. I could type faster than characters would go across the screen from that thing. The “good old days” weren’t always all that good, as I recall.
