Sample Code
Old style programming: not a hint of procedures, GOTO commands taking you hither and yon, no variable declarations - and line numbers to boot. Ah, those were the days...
COMMENTS
I feel Old, (but not as old as soom).
I remember keying in BASIC on an old Commodore 16+4, pages and pages of code from the manual to teach you how to code.
I also remember crying at my computer to myself after hours of typing a certain program and nothing happening.
At least I don't do that at work whn my code fails, I leave the room first.
Time for a quote
"...the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery." - Edsger Dijkstra
Never done me any harm etc.
Well... Apart from finding out at the age of 8, upon typing the fateful RUN [Enter] after inputting my first ever listing (the one for a version of Breakout supplied in the manual for the ZX Spectrum +3) that said listing was broken. I think that did do irreversible harm of the sort that played on my clearly genetic desire to fix anything that's broken and suckered me into coming back for that kind of punishment day in, day out, for the rest of my life. I often wonder whether the people responsible for that manual did it deliberately. Either way they changed the course of my life.
Aaaah .... memories.
I remember doing a 'conversion' of The Valley on the Commodore 64 around 1983/84, whilst another friend of mine did it for the Spectrum - writing it for the Speccy posed a few problems but the net result was a very faithful conversion.
Because the original code was for the PET, the C64 conversion wasn't *that* difficult even if it did take a bloody age to type in. Heady days indeed, and could well be the reason why I love rogue-like games even now.
Thanks for the links too .... it's *very* tempting to download the source and re-jig The Valley in Java or Perl :-)
I was on the other side
A little later than The Valley I worked for the magazine group which published Computing Today. My job was to test the games readers had sent in and prepare the listings to go into the magazines. I spent hours on the phone to people who'd typed them in and couldn't get them to work. People who didn't know the difference between a "(" and a "<" - well they are both brackets.
I suspect calls from people who'd typed in The Valley helped me get the job as Technical Editor there.
Simon
