Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/25/nostalgia-alert-scan-of-yo.html
…
Poke and peek commands. How far we’ve come.
7 Likes
It reminds me of Micro Adventures books, which I loved when I was in elementary school.
6 Likes
Wow! Those double-page all-colour airbrished Imagine adverts are a blast from the past.
Imagine was pretty much the first ‘professional’ games company in the UK, grew like craz, surfed a wave of hype about teenage millionaires and their Ferraris, and then imploded right in the middle of a BBC fly-on-the-wall documentary.
Jummy Maher’s frighteningly-addictive Digital Antiquarian has a three part series about how the rise and fall of Imagine created a hugely successful games industry on Merseyside:
https://www.filfre.net/2013/12/this-tormented-business-part-1/
3 Likes
If you’d like to try Saturn Lander:
Open this link.
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/playonline.php?eml=2&downid=27157
Wait for the STOP statement: “9 STOP statement, 9526:2”
Press down arrow and select “128 BASIC”
type “run” and press enter:
6 Likes
I was a pain in my father’s ass in 1983, but I do enjoy seeing the magazine.
1 Like
My father was seven years dead in 1983, I was on my second computer (and third in 1984) and I never did much with BASIC, certainly not typing in programs from magazines.
1 Like
So much knockoff software! Spectral Invaders! Galaxy Wars! To think you could run a business out of your garage, back in the 20th century!
1 Like
That takes me way back.
When I was a teenager I wrote a program which got into Compute!'s Gazette (“Impossible Scroll” September 1987 - Issue 51, Vol. 5, No. 9). It was mostly machine language with a demo program written in Basic to operate it. C’sG had a special loader program so you could enter raw bytes in hex with a checksum, instead of having to type tons of un-checked DATA statement to poke it in.
I received dwindling royalty checks for about 10 years after, totaling about $4000. It helped me buy books, furniture, and a small stereo, freshmen year in college.
11 Likes
Now, in the cities where programming is done, you’re lucky if you can find one to live in.
3 Likes
I used to type in those programs! (In 1982? 83?)
4 Likes
My favorite part of those magazines (I was a Byte kid, myself) was the corrections section.
Four months ago, our program "Super Awesome Game" contained an error.
The line reading
780 DATA 1,0,0,1,0,1,0,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,1,0,1,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,1
should have read
780 DATA 1,0,1,0,0,0,1,0,0,1,0,1,1,1,1,0,1,0,1,0,0,0,0,1,0,1,1,0,1
We apologize to Apple //e users whose computers or homes were
irrevocably damaged by the resulting CPU fires.
12 Likes
fun times!
It was super frustrating and tedious!
I vaguely remember one of the computer mags offering a data entry program for the c64 that had check-summing. You still had to key in page after page of numbers to get your programs, but it would alert you when you made a typo.
One baby step up from the stone age.
2 Likes
not the first time i’ve been told i have a weird sense of fun. 
People in the past did odd things with their free time.
p.214. Mr T. Jevon admits to being a ‘very naughty boy’.
Fixed that.
Oh yeah, I definitely remember typing in games for my BBC Micro in the mid to late 80s, my dad reading the lines out and me typing them in. The phrase “syntax error” is permanently burned into my brain as a result. Fun times…
2 Likes
