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If you had an 8-bit computer when you were a kid then chances are this image will bring back many happy memories of going into all the shops that sold home computers and making them run this little program. Â Of course, you may have made it display something other than just “HELLO”, but whether it was just extended to include your name (e.g. “BIG BOO IS COOL”) or something a bit ruder was up to you.
In those days just about every computer you could buy had a built in version of the programming language BASIC (who will be first to post the answer as a comment I wonder?). Â This meant that you could write your own programs (which normally meant games) if you could be bothered to learn all those weird commands like PEEK, POKE and GOSUB. Â For those that didn’t want to learn all that rubbish, there was always the type in listing.
Back then magazines such as Your Computer (remember that computer buffs?) printed pages of listings for you to type in yourself at home. Â Normally these were written in BASIC but occasionally they were written in machine code, as it was referred to, which was the native instruction set of the central processing unit. Â On many computers this meant typing in a BASIC listing first which then let you type in thousands of hexadecimal numbers. Â What joy!
There were also entire books devoted to computer listings, many of which had titles like “50 Amazing Games for the ZX Spectrum“, which had a picture on the cover of some awesome looking game, which you soon found out wasn’t one of the games from the book, but I’ll come to that in a minute.
So, you sat there typing in page after page of gobbledy gook, searching the keyboard to see how to produce that checkboard graphic or the image of a white heart on a black background. Â If you were lucky you could coax someone into reading out the listing for you so you didn’t have to keep looking back and forth, which sped things up a bit. Â I remember my Dad helping me on many occasions, which was quite amusing as we invented our own shorthand for some of the characters, such as “dog ears” for speech marks, “wiggly A” for the @ sign and the rather less clever “comma with a dot on top” for semi-colon.
Several hours later you had typed the entire thing in and it was prudent at this stage to save everything to a blank cassette before entering the magic word “RUN” and pressing enter. Â There was a hush from all around, followed by a groan as the screen displayed:-
SYNTAX ERROR IN LINE 450
Great! Â What the heck did that mean? Â So it was back to the listing to find line 450 and enter it again. Â Wind the tape back, save again, enter RUN and up would come a title screen saying “PRESS A KEY”. Â You pressed a key and…
UNDEF'D ERROR IN LINE 630
Nice. Â So the cycle repeated re-entering lines until finally you had them all correct and the game could finally be played. Â And what a disappointment that was. Â You usually ended up with some poor Space Invaders or Pacman clone (if you were lucky) or failing that a game of Hangman. Â The graphics were made from whatever built in graphical characters your computer had, and if there was any sound at all chances it would just be the odd beep.
The thing that was most amazing though was that although that game would keep you enthralled for all of five minutes, you would then reset the computer, and for some unfathomable reason, start to enter another listing, in the undying hope that maybe, just maybe, then next game would be as good as the ones you bought from W.H.Smith.
My humble little Acorn Electron was sadly abuse with JANE HEART FRASER in multi hued colours and repeating in an endless loop. I too owned those books which promised greatness after 900 lines of code and I too suffered continual disappointment.
But you didn’t mention loading games from tape decks when after seven hours and much hexidecimal later the whole think would crash to screams of pain and torment.
Thanks for the memories Big Boo. I remember many a hour, sat in my bedroom keying in listings into my speccy with it’s rubber keyboard and all the joys that came with it. All the fun of the errors, especially after checking your code, you found that it was entered 100% correct, only to realise it was obviously a mistake in the original listing (happened once or twice to me) from a paper based mag (and I mean newspaper type paper) called something “like Computing Weekly” (if I remember rightly). That was a regular through my door along with the Sinclair User mag ….wooo.
Ah well, it was a great start in the career I’m in today…so wasn’t all bad.
My mate’s Spectrum was particularly good at resetting just as the game was about to finish loading. It made watching those flashing coloured borders a very tense experience.
Mark, I think I used to get the same magazine when I was a kid. I think it was Popular Computing Weekly and it usually had a back page advert for Automata games (creators of text adventure Pimania among others) which took the form of a comic strip. I used to love reading it, although most of the gags went straight over my head at the time.
Have your heard about the new BBC4 comedrama they’re bringing out? It’s gonna be called ‘Syntax Era’ and document the 80s home computer wars. Truth.
I coded a game on my old Amstrad CPC, a text adventure game about a bunch of inept cops. I thought it was awesome at the time, but if I played it today I bet it would suck… still, I was only about 12 and proud of it
Sounds interesting. I’ll have to keep my eyes peeled for that one. Although I’ll probably find out it was on yesterday now and have to watch it on iPlayer in glorious stop-start-block-o-vision.
BigBoo – You’re right about the magazine, that’s exactly what it was. I remember the Automata adverts as well, I seem to remember they offered a £10K prize if you completed the game (not sure about the figure, but it seemed huge at the time).
In regards to the resetting, the speccy’s where notorious for dodgy power connectors, can’t remember how many times I had mine replaced!
It was Nibble Magazine and the Apple ][+/][e for me. i also learned to touch type typing in all those programs.
I only ever remember seeing an Apple ][ computer once in the UK, and I can’t remember where I saw it now. They weren’t very prevalent over here, but I hear they were pretty good, similar in specification to the Commodore 64?
I remember my first computer was the Sinclair ZX81, which if I remember came standard with a mighty 1kb of ram. At some point I upgraded to 16kb of ram. This cost as much as the computer in the first place. All so I could play such mighty games as Mazogs!
I can’t remember what I had for dinner last night without thinking about it but 27 years later I still remember a great deal of my BBC BASIC code. These lovely lines raised a few eyebrows at school.
ENVELOPE 1,1,26,36,45,255,255,255,127,0,0,0,126,0
SOUND 1,1,1,1
I never did get the hang of the ENVELOPE command, but I’m guessing this was one of those ones that made it sound like a police siren or something like that?
http://computer-programming-tutorials.suite101.com/article.cfm/making_sounds_with_basic_programs
There was also a series of books in the 1980s that were teen adventure books that required you to debug some BASIC programs in order to advance the story. (One was about cracking a code, like a Caesar cipher; another was a time machine simulator, which involved you going to the time of George Washington at Valley Forge) These books were kinda like Choose Your Own Adventure stories, but teaching programming at the same time.
Unfortunately, I cannot remember the names of those books. Does anyone remember these?
I never came across these books, but they sound as if they would have been right up my street when I was a kid, given I loved my computers and the Choose Your Own Adventure books.
I had one of those books, SwingCorey. It was very D&D influenced, and written in a kind of Esperanto version of BASIC in order to (a) save space in the book and (b) cover as many home computers as possible to maximise appeal. I managed to scrape along with my Commodore 64 – I had a fair knowledge of its BASIC – until it got to the graphics bits. Up till then it had been like a pretty good text adventure, but now we were about to enter some sort of cave system or something and there were Visual Puzzles. As any C64 owner will know, it had no direct BASIC commands for high resolution graphics at all, so all these DRAW, CIRCLE, POINT and DOT commands were impossible to convert! So I never found out what happened in the end!