LOAD "*",8,1

[brianmanahan]

RUN

 

[Chaotic42]

 

[sdifox]

I remember getting the Apple 2 clone and trying to load programs. Went through all the tape decks we sold and had to use the cheapest car deck since it lacked Dolby NR.


C64 keyboard really sucked.

 

[Paperdoc]

Or the quicker short form: lO "*",8,1

For any commercial game on a floppy.

I did a lot of useful stuff on a C64. The most complex was to prepare spreadsheets and a text document for a business plan to submit to our bank in support of an application for loans to start up a small unique clothing store that we ran for 28 years. At the time I was unemployed.

We have a cute photo of our son maybe 1 year old in the 80's at the C64 with a game. He is now a computer networking expert working with a regional telecom company doing data mining and analyses to support management planning of two customer service groups.

 

[sandorski]

Floppy? Much more luxurious compared to the Datasette.

 

[Chaotic42]

I remember the power brick for my C64 used to get dangerously hot, like way hotter than I would allow in my house as an adult. Good times. Never did beat Boulderdash, I always got stuck on Level N.

 

[brianmanahan]

I remember the power brick for my C64 used to get dangerously hot, like way hotter than I would allow in my house as an adult. Good times. Never did beat Boulderdash, I always got stuck on Level N.

interesting, i never noticed it getting hot, but i usually played with it in a cold basement

i think my favorite game of all time was "little computer people", like a precursor to the sims

 

[Iron Woode]

Or the quicker short form: lO "*",8,1

For any commercial game on a floppy.

I did a lot of useful stuff on a C64. The most complex was to prepare spreadsheets and a text document for a business plan to submit to our bank in support of an application for loans to start up a small unique clothing store that we ran for 28 years. At the time I was unemployed.

We have a cute photo of our son maybe 1 year old in the 80's at the C64 with a game. He is now a computer networking expert working with a regional telecom company doing data mining and analyses to support management planning of two customer service groups.

BASIC 4.0

Di(shift r)

 

[Paperdoc]

We got ours with the tape deck at first. First favourite game was Temple of Apshai in three cassettes for all the levels. A year later when we got a disk drive I copied all those files to one diskette for much faster access. Anyone remember using that with "Flippy Disks"?
Another popular one in our family was Cave of the Word Wizard. The Wizard's famous quote was' "It's getting darker!'
I crashed many light aircraft in Flight Simulator.
One year for a school Science Fair project for my daughter I wrote a program using a third-party cartridge add-on called Simon's Basic to measure people's reaction times to stimuli like sound and a screen image. We set up in shopping malls to get volunteer subjects. Tried to relate results to things like age, gaming experience, etc.

 

[brianmanahan]

Floppy? Much more luxurious compared to the Datasette.

oh yeah, i got the 1541 with my C64

it all reeked of smoke because it lived with smokers for 10 years, but a smelly C64 + 200 floppies + 20 cartridges for 50$ is still worth it

 

[Minerva]

load gorillas.bas

 

[brianmanahan]

load gorillas.bas

i loved qbasic! still have all my old qbasic programs from the mid 90s saved, i should dosbox those things sometime

 

[Charmonium]

Back in my day . . .

[short delay for eyerolls]

we didn't have microcomputers. If you wanted to fuck around with a computer, you'll learn FORTRAN IV and you'll like it, god damn it.

 

[Paperdoc]

^ Yeah, before computers I first did "programming" on programmable calculators with limited resources and limited removable storage devices. Then my first computer uses (late 60's) were with mainframe central systems using PL/1 and APL. Almost all using programs written by others to process lab data - that work was certainly beyond my skills. A major use was performing Fourier Transforms on data (collected on punched paper tape) from an interferometer operating in the Far-Infrared light region. When I started my Ph.D. program my advisory board recommended I take as my "foreign language" option a half-course in FORTRAN which I thoroughly enjoyed. Textbook was FORTRAN IV with WATFOR and WATFIVE. The family's C64 we got in early 80's was my intro to BASIC.

 

[Charmonium]

^ Yeah, before computers I first did "programming" on programmable calculators with limited resources and limited removable storage devices. Then my first computer uses (late 60's) were with mainframe central systems using PL/1 and APL. Almost all using programs written by others to process lab data - that work was certainly beyond my skills. A major use was performing Fourier Transforms on data (collected on punched paper tape) from an interferometer operating in the Far-Infrared light region. When I started my Ph.D. program my advisory board recommended I take as my "foreign language" option a half-course in FORTRAN which I thoroughly enjoyed. Textbook was FORTRAN IV with WATFOR and WATFIVE. The family's C64 we got in early 80's was my intro to BASIC.

In high school, mom signed me up for a fortran (formula translator) course at NJIT (Newark College of Engineering at the time). I lived in dread of Saturdays for an entire semester.

You have to understand that back in the old days (early 70s) all computer facilities had to be kept very cool. I was a skinny kid so between that and the fluorescent lights, every f'ing week I left there with a massive headache. But that was probably just me. As I've mentioned before, I have brain damage from Eastern Equine Encephalitis as a child.

But the punch cards played their role in my suffering as well. There's no backspace on a punch card machine. So I would always have an impressive stack of discarded/errored punch cards.

And if you spent an hour or two typing out your program on the cards, there was always the chance that the card reader was hungry and would eat some of your cards.

Last but not least was the error report. An indecipherable list of codes indicating the many ways in which you had offended the machine gods.

 

[sdifox]

I used to code on paper and do step by step run with a register sheet