Edited by author 06-11-2003 08:22 PM
Fascinating...this truly is from the early days of
personal computing (I remember buying
"Creative Computing" in the early 1980's, when
the microcomputer boom was in full swing).

The term "enthusiast" comes to mind,
wielding soldering irons, SF paperbacks,
hex code and weird ideas.

Check out this T-shirt!


tom
-=W=-

Boss!

I have a stack of Byte magazines from around 1982. Also, probably still have a bunch of Omni magazines from that time. Never thought of scanning them though. hmmm....

A clear example of why copyright should be 14 years, renewable for a second 14 years, as it was originally in the US.

I forgot to mention that I found the CC page via Jason Kottke's blog.

Gawd, go look at the listing for DEEPSPACE. Horrible, awful, undocumented spaghetti code, festering with GOTO statements and letter-number variable names.

But I remember typing it in on my IBM PC and having all sorts of fun elaborating on it.

From what I barely remember of the bad-old-days of BASIC programming, wouldn't it have been impossible to implement a program like DEEPSPACE without using a ton of goto's?

I thought goto's were essential in BASIC.

Wow, this brings back memories, I'd love to see some of those old basic computer games books again.

Where is the Crumb ad?

Love this! Reminds me of the days I'd see Commodores at the store and sneak a program that randomly flashed the screen crazy colors with POKE 53280's and 53281's and walk away.

But question: on this page, lines like 620, 1390, 1460 have no spaces after the line numbers. Can these be misprints? i don't see a logical pattern to it.

Who the hell is Roger Crumb? Maybe you mean Robert Crumb. Don't see any ads by him... or any ads at all really... Maybe you mean the cover... nope, that's Gilbert Shelton, a different hippie underground cartoonist, (creator of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers)... At least one of us is confused.

I just noticed this page:
http://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=147
CC used to run Trots and Bonnie by Shary Flenniken, but it's omitted from the online archive "at the request of the artist."

ernie, look close and you'll see those lines have handwritten corrections. That's a printout from an old teletype, I used to have one of those, oh man did it take forever to print. Sometimes it was faster to just hand write minor corrections on a printout, than to print it out again. Back when I was a kid, we didn't have no fancy laser printers, we used 110 baud teletypes, and we LIKED it!

D'oh! Yeah, I got the first name wrong.

R. Crumb did the BACK COVER of the FIRST EDITION of the "BEST OF CREATIVE COMPUTING VOLUME ONE."

It's kind of hard to find. Bring up the thumbnails, and keep paging forward until you reach the last set. It's a nice over-the-top ad urging people to subscribe.

There's a Fabulous Furry Freak bros. cartoon in there. But not Trots & Bonny. Looks like Flenniken (sp?) didn't give permission.

Jornin, David Ahl is selling the last stock of the old books! See the link on the bottom of the page.

Stefan Jones: All those comments and long variable names they ommitted would've consumed precious bytes, and I'm sure (although I never had one--I started on a C64) most circa-1976 machines wouldn't have had much RAM period, especially if the OS and BASIC were in RAM, not ROM. And at least in C64 BASIC, only the first two characters in a variable name were significant anyway.

ernie: My brother played a nice prank on some Apple ]['s at school one time, he turned off the monitor and ran a program that waited out a long, long, long busy loop, beeped like crazy for a few seconds, then went back to the busy loop. Apparently drove people nuts until they figured out to look for the power LED. My own fave computer prank involved the PCs our school bought to replace the Apples. They all booted from a handful of MS-DOS floppies (no networks or hard disks, natch.) so, after seeing the PROMPT command in a DOS manual, I changed all the DOS prompts to say things like "This machine is posessed!" and "Who is Randy River, and why isn't he wearing any clothes?"

Never read the magazine (it was virtually impossible to get in my part of the UK) but the books were available,and I remember spending hours and hours putting the games from "Basic Computer Games" and "More Basic Computer Games" into the old Microtan 65 I had back in the early 80s.
Come to think of it, I still have those books. They're in a cupboard in my old room in my Dad's house.

Art: RYCT Stefan - I remember a BASIC program I wrote in about '81 - '82 where I had to remove all my REM statements and renumber the program in increments of one (removing a zero from each number) to free up enough memory for the program to run. Worked too. Memory was always a tight squeeze! Kids today, don't know they're born.

Hee! I still have Basic Computer Games and More Basic Computer Games in the shelf.

Haven't looked at 'em in years, of course, and whenever I cull books it seems like a good idea to get rid of them... but they keep surviving on nostalgia alone.

Art & Dop: I know WHY those listings lacked comments and long variable names, and were fulla GOTOs. I wrote my first programs on a DEC PDP-8/e. It's just a shock seeing this primieval stuff again.

I mean, jeeze, they apparently didn't have GOSUB statements!

I once co-wrote a commercial program (COLORTROPE, for a D.C. children's museum) in IBM-PC BASICA. 64kb limit. I recall having to overlay-in modules, and putting multiple commands on a line in order to conserve line numbers.

Some of the later BASICs (e.g., QBasic, Turbo Basic) are actually decent languages. I wrote a lot of stuff in them before cracking down and learning C, C++, Java, etc.

I liked the Dickson story on page 133. He has the perfect story of what will happen with the government's current massive computerized sifting operation at TIA. 28 years ahead of his time.

While I'm waiting to be arrested I think I'll translate some of those programs into Python.