Give Yourself More Playtime (2015)

I wonder if he really was afraid of the government, or if he was just tried to keep his brother from loading the games. The part where he actually cuts the physical tape is great. The funny thing is that, without cutting the tape, anybody can load the games any way, just like this: Rewind the tape. LOAD the first program (i.e. the password program). Note that the tape is positioned after the password program now. Reset the C64. Enter LOAD to load the actual game.

Great story. Also, a great learning experience. This is what I liked about the old times of the C64 and others, they invited so much for these learning experiences. Good old times :)<p>But even today, many years later and working as a software developer, my greatest source of innovation are the at the beginning goofy ideas and silly experiments.

Reminds me when I wrote my first .COM infecting virus. It worked very well. It infected COMMAND.COM and then the rest of the hard drive. Unfortunately, it had a bug so programs wouldn&#x27;t work anymore (except command.com).<p>And I did the test on the PC of a friend of my dad.<p>A very long moment of loneliness happened to 15 y.o. wannabe hacker when dad and his friend realized the mess :-)

Interesting story, but probably a false memory as Commodore 64 did not auto run programs loaded from tape or disk by default.<p>Sinclair Spectrum did, but that was also easily be circumventable by using the MERGE command instead of LOAD.

This is a legitimately awesome story---possibly the most delightful thing I&#x27;ve ever read from HN. That is all.

&gt; Eventually I learned that POKE allows you to change values at specific memory addresses<p>I remember, with my first TI99&#x2F;4A home computer, reading tons of program listings and trying to port Vic 20, C64, Spectrum, etc programs to it.<p>Many of the programs had hundreds of peeks and pokes, which the TI99 lacked. I thought it was an additional super power that I was missing. The envy.<p>I eventually got them with the Mini Memory module and the Extended Basic. Soon I discovered they were not &quot;compatible&quot;.

That&#x27;s an awesome story. &quot;Play around more. Discover things.&quot; indeed!

The moral of the story is: Use a password manager.