PEEK and POKE, PLOT and PRINT

[Darren Dirt]

Basic instinct: how we used to code -- In praise of Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code


retro reminiscing. 

[Mr. Analog]

Commodore 64 is 30 today

Let that sink in for a moment

Have a nice day

[Darren Dirt]

Commodore 64 is 30 today

Let that sink in for a moment

Have a nice day

Yeesh, 30 million units over 11 years! http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=98


btw reminds me, anyone else from the Edmonton area that remembers a local show in the 1980s that would sometimes come on (Shaw Cable 10 I think) where they played computer games on a C64 ... and the opening theme music was (I kid you not) The Beatles' "When I'm 64" ?

[Mr. Analog]

Oh god, I remember that, right when we first moved here ('84/'85?)

[Darren Dirt]

Oh god, I remember that, right when we first moved here ('84/'85?)

One ep I distinctly recall had them playing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_Mission


^ oh great, now I've just clicked http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epyx and I'm in total click-click flashback mode... I guess I'm due for my morning break 

lol remember some of the old "box art" on games? that totally raised your expectations to unrealistic levels?


and JEEPERS I so do miss the ol' arcade...
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/quartet/quartet.htm
Ah the golden age of quarter-munchers, when graphics were cooler there than what you could find @ home ... but many of the games were a decent difficulty level and eventually could earn you 30+ minutes of amusement on a single coin.

[Mr. Analog]

Oh god, I remember that, right when we first moved here ('84/'85?)

One ep I distinctly recall had them playing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_Mission

Neat it's on the Wii Virtual Console!

[Thorin]

Basic instinct: how we used to code -- In praise of Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code

Here's the actual point to the three-page article:

It's a common belief that it was the death of the 1980s hobbyist scene, due to cheaper games consoles initially and online gaming latterly, that caused the clear and marked decline in prospective IT undergraduates and employees.

So...  There was a clear and marked decline in prospective IT undergraduates and employees?  Maybe the increase in IT jobs outpaced the increase in people learning IT?

[Darren Dirt]

True dat. But also it became more difficult for someone to just 'pick it up' over a weekend with a single book from the library. Soon it turned into needing layers of APIs to do the simplest thing (e.g. draw a happy face on screen and make it move nsew based on a keyboard press), and eventually joat was replaced by countless niche skill sets.

Although Mayor Bloomberg seems to be on the optimism side of the fence here. So maybe my perspective is curmudgeony aka 'back when I was a kid it was so much easier to...'


Speaking of that bolded word ^ , anyone else find themselves nodding TONS while reading the comments to the article? #notsureifgoodthing

[Thorin]

No, you can still make crappy little programs that do almost nothing and look like shyte.  These "toddler scrawlings", when compared to the highly-polished games and programs created today, simply aren't as interesting because they're orders of magnitude further apart in form and function.

[Tom]

No, you can still make crappy little programs that do almost nothing and look like shyte.  These "toddler scrawlings", when compared to the highly-polished games and programs created today, simply aren't as interesting because they're orders of magnitude further apart in form and function.

And yet, Minecraft.

[Thorin]

I think you're implying Minecraft is like a toddler scrawl.  I really don't think the amount or type of code put into Minecraft is anywhere near as simple as the amount or type of code put into what we as eleven year olds might have typed in as one of our first forty programs in BASIC.

[Tom]

I think you're implying Minecraft is like a toddler scrawl.  I really don't think the amount or type of code put into Minecraft is anywhere near as simple as the amount or type of code put into what we as eleven year olds might have typed in as one of our first forty programs in BASIC.

No of course not. There's a LOT of code in there. But then amount of code isn't exactly a benchmark of quality.

I was just trying to say that something that is an order of magnitude (or more) less polished than something else can still make it.

[Lazybones]

There are piles of flash games still out there that people love and many of those have very simple code.

[Darren Dirt]

to clarify, imo the point of the article (and the reason I posted it) is captured in much of the COMMENTS in the article -- how BASIC opened the door for countless developers, hooked them in via its simplicity and "instant feedback" attribute. The Golden Days with INPUT Magazine and Compute! Magazine having code you could type in and get something working, that was a gamechanger, gone were punchcards and PhD-level mathematics and algorithms required to "program". Read all the comments how many remember taking a weekend to fly through the "orange book", the Sinclair BASIC manual which apparently had really good examples and got people to "click" with the whole "I can do this!" mentality. Allowing for the obvious deficiencies of BASIC, it still was the "starter" for a lot of very good developers, who are still working in the IT field, including yours truly. There really was something special about those early days of my programming life, using some DATA statements to fill in a string that would replace an ASCII character with a happy face or a gun aka "redefining the character set", or using PUT$ to this combo of numbers onto the screen at an exact X,Y co-ordinate, a hacked version of a "sprite", whee! All without even needing a graphics program, heck not even a mouse.


Contrast that with today, folks thinking HTML+Javascript = programming, sure it is in a way, but there's just so many layers of abstraction from the basic structures within the OS/CPU... back in the early days of BASIC in the *home* (that was a big deal, not needing to be an engineer to actually make your computer DO STUFF) you pretty quickly learned which PEEKs and POKEs did cool things (direct access to pixels or keyboard functions, sounds, floppy drive motor on/off etc.) and that got you closer to understanding what's "under the hood", and thinking logically, paving the way for solid Pascal and C/C++ programmers to explode into the workplace. There isn't an equivalent toolset out there now for the next generation of young 'uns. That's the gist (imo).

[Thorin]

Based on the first post in this thread:

Basic instinct: how we used to code -- In praise of Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code


retro reminiscing. 

I didn't realize you were actually referring to the _comments_ on the article rather than the article itself, so thanks for that clarification.  Maybe say that explicitly next time, though.

As a rule I tend not to read all the comments as there is so much fluff compared to useful comments and there are so many comments on the internet that I could never read them all in my lifetime.