Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Very cool. Get 'em while they're young. I can't imagine kids these days would copy out games in basic by hand the way I had to on my first computer :)



As a 22-year-old, I can't believe you ever did that.


I'm 44, and started programming when I was 12 on a ZX81 and then a Commodore64. Back then we had magazines instead of the internet, and any serious program was written in assembly rather than BASIC. One of the more advanced things the magazines did was print out hex dumps of the machine code, with a checksum on each line, and there was a program (which you had to enter manually) that would let you type in those hex dumps. It would checksum each line as you went along and warn you if the checksum you entered didn't match the checksum of the bytes you entered. That was a huge improvement over just typing in the programs, because you knew you didn't have any typos.

Many, many hours were spent typing those programs in. I'm still really good at typing with one hand while the other is used to point at what I'm typing in.


On the Altair 8800 we had to toggle in the hex bytes using switches on the front panel! Ha!


I'm 28 now. I totally did that! I copied a bunch of programs by hand, from a single-player pong clone to a 3d plotting engine with hidden-line elimination on an Apple ][e.


I'm 28 and I totally did this on my TI-83.


I'm 35, and I did that on my commodore 64. The program was in the book, you typed it out. Although in truth I think I only did this once.

Usually I just loaded games from the tape cassette loader.


I'm 26, I remember borrowing a few books from the library that walked through creating a game in QBASIC.

Those were the days. :')


21 and did that on an old TRS-80 in my basement.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: