Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era

As someone who spent a decent chunk of his youth typing BASIC commands from Books like these into a Mattel Aquarius, I’m pretty disenchanted by the choice of languages.<p>None of them embody the human-first optimism of early BASICs. BASIC was designed for <i>normal humans</i> to actually get work done, the same vision HyperCard would bring later. It’s reflected and it’s very English syntax. It was, in no uncertain terms, the actual User Interface to many if not most consumer level machines of the age.<p>I don’t have a strong proposition for a specific language. QB64 is maybe the closest syntactically, but nothing lives up to the <i>spirit</i> of the originals that I am aware of. I was kind of hopeful I was going to get to the end of this and it was going to be a call for developers to work on a new, modern, humane programming language.<p>People try to tell me that dream is dead. God I hope not, computers in the hands of most users are 99% untapped potential. It’s as if Prometheus give us fire, and we only ever used it to light cigarettes. Every time a user does a repetitive task that should have been a loop they created themself, that waste of life is a small death, and the blood is on our industry.

Oh man, I learned so much from these books and a few other similar ones.<p>I learned to program a few years after these were popular (around 1991 or so), but a friend of my dad’s gifted me a bunch of them after he found out I was into computers. I was 8, and it changed my life.<p>They were magical to me. I didn’t even have access to a BASIC interpreter yet (I didn’t even know what that meant), but I read the intro to BASIC programming book and the computer games books so many times. I remember running to my parents room to tell them I could use PRINT to output to the screen. I would write programs by hand onto paper.<p>I remember a few months later going to my dad’s friend and asking, “ok, where do I type these programs in?” He gave me a copy of QBasic, and away I went.<p>I remember having to learn so much to get the games to work. I learned about different versions of BASIC, and how to convert things to work in my version. Taking bits of one game and combining them with others. Making my own.<p>My life has never been the same since.

&gt; bear in mind these are very primitive games from the 1970s. They aren&#x27;t going to win any awards for gameplay, or programming sophistication<p>This is where I feel sad for today&#x27;s kids.<p>The pressure to make a great game was lower back then.<p>Programming felt like an amazing accomplishment very quickly.<p>Now, kids feel like they&#x27;ve accomplished very little, even though they&#x27;re doing more with less code than we did during our generation.<p>Miss those days.

I distinctly remember my first program as a five-year-old child:<p>10 PRINT &quot;CHAZ WOZ ERE &quot;<p>20 GOTO 10<p>In the UK one of the main retailers of 8bit computers was Boots the Chemist. This store is functionally equivalent to America&#x27;s CVS or Walgreens (who know owns a big chunk of Boots). They would have all the computers on shelves hooked up to TVs. And of course, almost all computers of the day would boot into BASIC.<p>My Mum would leave me in Boots in front of the computers while she went around town for hours doing the shopping each week and I would happily learn programming, picking up new ideas from older teenagers who would be happy to show off their superior coding skills.<p>It would be three years until my parents could buy me a Spectrum of my own. In that time before I had my own, my Dad would pick up the occasional computer book from a second-hand store and I would read technical manuals and programming books cover-to-cover in my bedroom, having to imagine the output in my head.<p>Those were the days!

Personally, Compute! magazine was my goto for games... The fact it autocheck the checksum at the end of each line was a sanity saver!<p>Anyone else remember the hex code dumps they had for entering&#x2F;checking machine language programs? I still remember going thru 84 screens of the stuff to get an awesome monitor program with assembly&#x2F;disassembly functionality!

I remember getting that book from the library and getting the games to work on my TI-99&#x2F;4a. The BASIC dialect on that machine was not quite the same as used in the book so some translation was necessary. Can&#x27;t copy&#x2F;paste from a book (copy&#x2F;paste wasn&#x27;t a thing on that machine anyway) so you had to sit down and type it in, keystroke by keystroke. I think the slow pace of it helped me understand what the program was doing. If a line was &quot;GOTO 500&quot; I would always look down at line 500 and try to understand why that jump was there.

For a few years now I’ve been teching my son to code. This feels like a good project to do together. Grab one of these games understand it in basic and then reimplement it using my fav language.<p>Any other parents out there teaching their kids&#x2F;teens&#x2F;young adults to code?

I was introduced to programming by the book that came with The Apple IIGS, &quot;A Touch of Applesoft Basic.&quot; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple2.pl&#x2F;books&#x2F;applesoft.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple2.pl&#x2F;books&#x2F;applesoft.pdf</a><p>I&#x27;ve always wondered if it was one of the most influential books, ever. It certainly influenced me!

It would be nice to do a few things with these classic and influential games (isn&#x27;t the original BASIC version of The Oregon Trail in there?):<p>- Update them with the minimal changes required to run on a modern-ish Microsoft(style) BASIC.<p>- Rewrite them in a modern beginner-friendly(ish) language like Python. (This seems to be what the author wants to do.)<p>- Create (hopefully) easy-to-understand JavaScript versions that can be run in a web browser.<p>- Create an compatible BASIC interpreter that can run them as-is in a web browser.<p>- Create modern-ish versions of the games with pixel graphics where appropriate.<p>- Create some new, simple but interesting and fun, modern-style games in a modern language&#x2F;environment, to serve a similar purpose for current generations of computing enthusiasts and people who haven&#x27;t discovered the fun of simple programming.

I remember getting out all these C64&#x2F;BASIC programming books from the library when I was a kid. They were filled with cartoon robots and such if I remember correctly.<p>I remember typing a &quot;lot&quot; (I was somewhere in the 5-7 range at that point) of code from those (and other) books into our C64. I don&#x27;t recall understanding most&#x2F;any of what I wrote, but I think it got me sufficiently interested to keep me going until I got to an age that I actually understood what I was doing.<p>[update: I think I found them, they were by usborne and inexplicably are now free :D : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usborne.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;books&#x2F;computer-and-coding-books" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usborne.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;books&#x2F;computer-and-coding-books</a>]

I still have my copy, the original DEC edition. Dave Ahl was one of my heroes back then.

My origin story-book is Donald D. Spencer&#x27;s &quot;Game playing with BASIC&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openlibrary.org&#x2F;works&#x2F;OL15199613W&#x2F;Game_playing_with_BASIC" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openlibrary.org&#x2F;works&#x2F;OL15199613W&#x2F;Game_playing_with_...</a><p>It introduced me to programming as well as many casino games like craps, blackjack, slot machines, video poker...

A few years ago, David Ahl was kind enough to sell me copies of the first two years of Creative Computing magazine. Those are a treasure. I love the offbeat informality of them, the cartoons, the old wood engravings.

These books were great. What especially captured my imagination were not just the drawings, but the fact that every listing would be prefaced by a print-out of a run of the game. This made it really easy to see what the program was about (entertaining enough by itself) but it would also allow me to map whatever the game was doing with the BASIC listing next to it. This was kind of like using a debugger to step through the program and it was a really neat way to learn about control flow and program structure.

Wow. These books were, well, foundational to me. I had a blast typing those into my C64. Then at a summer camp (CTY at F&amp;M) I thought I was so very clever for writing a version of Nim where the computer would silently pick to go first or second so that it always won. I don&#x27;t know why I still remember that.<p>And then some summer jobs writing dBase III and FoxPro, some actual education, and here I am.<p>Those books absolutely set the tone and sparked that first interest.

Any MacOS users who might need a little help running the originals: I downloaded the GitHub sources for the book and then downloaded the MacOS version of Vintage BASIC.<p>To run Super Star Trek, this command line worked for me in Terminal:<p>~&#x2F;Downloads&#x2F;vintage-basic-1.0.3&#x2F;bin&#x2F;vintbas ~&#x2F;Downloads&#x2F;basic-computer-games-main&#x2F;84_Super_Star_Trek&#x2F;superstartrek.bas

Hm. I thought it was going to be about this book:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.retro-kit.co.uk&#x2F;page.cfm&#x2F;content&#x2F;Advanced-Programming-Techniques-For-The-BBC-Micro&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.retro-kit.co.uk&#x2F;page.cfm&#x2F;content&#x2F;Advanced-Progra...</a><p>Hands down the best book from that era, it taught so many useful concepts in a very accessible way.

This is exactly how I got into computers at age 4. I’d type-in game code on the family Atari 800, taking great satisfaction if&#x2F;when the games finally ran without throwing errors.<p>I’ve been looking for a similar resource to introduce my daughters.

Most worthwhile thing Atwood has ever done. The rest of his portfolio pales in comparison.