I just find the concept of programming at such a low level fascinating. Stripping away all the complexities, boilerplate, and niceties of modern programing and ending up with a system like this where you go from directly modifying the contents of memory, to playing a fully fledged game written in basic is amazing.<p>A good reminder that at the end of the day all this CS stuff is just ones and zeros in a chip.
Lovely background on what looks like the same machines working life here (PDF link)<p><a href="http://vtda.org/docs/computing/SEL/SEL810ARonPrice.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://vtda.org/docs/computing/SEL/SEL810ARonPrice.pdf</a>
I enjoy these retro computing videos. I have fond memories of programming on IBM 360 series systems, DEC, DG, TI and PR1ME systems. I was fortunate that my high school in the 70s had a PDP-8 and an ASR-33 TTY that students could sign up to use.<p>So much of life is a matter of luck, and I was definitely lucky to be a part of the computer revolution over the course of my career.
If you want to learn more about what he's doing on the front panel there, check out this fantastic introduction to how the first PCs were operated with front panel switches. This series is about the Altair 8800 but the same ideas apply to most computers of the era. It starts out writing programs with front panel switches, then shows how bootloader programs worked to load larger programs off of tape or some other IO mechanism. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suyiMfzmZKs&list=PLB3mwSROoJ4KLWM8KwK0cD1dhX35wILBj" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suyiMfzmZKs&list=PLB3mwSROoJ...</a>
This brought back an old memory. My first exposure to a lunar lander game looked very similar to the game he plays in the video. It was at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle. This was in the early 80s, so it was probably running on a microcomputer, not a behemoth like this. I only vaguely understood what was happening, and I couldn't land successfully. But I loved it, nonetheless.
I really wish I could have gotten my 7 year old son to think that this was what games looked like. He would have stuck to his Diary of a Wimpy kid books and never looked back.