Remember manually typing Commodore 64 BASIC games? I found a printout in a haul of C64 goodies. Picture yourself sitting at your C64 painstakingly entering every line of this code...and then it doesn't work lol!

I used to buy the games magazines, and instead of game disks on the cover, they’d give you the full source code in the magazine to type out yourself. Good times 👍

Like Compute!'s Gazette, it had the epic type in game Crossroads (1 & 2), amazing game.

And that‘s when we started learning how to code - through lengthy debug sessions 😂

So true, this is how I also learnt patience too.

I used to write assembler in a spiral notebook because I didn’t have my own computer

And look where it took you Walter, humble beginnings without a computer to creating Dlang!

Yeah, but truth be told, storing information on paper lasts a LOT longer than all electromagnetic storage. Punch cards were a smarter idea than a lot of "tech" people assume.

Yeah, well-stored card deck from the 1960s can still be read today with a basic light sensor setup. I have plenty of C64 tapes and floppies from the 80's that don't work.

Yeah, and SSD technology is wiped out when it loses its stored charge, since it literally runs on electricity.

Yes you enter all that code and you have to figure out where you forgot to include a comma!

Or it was a fullstop entered instead. It taught us patience and attention to detail.

I wrote a BIOS (in Assembler) for an S-100 computer. It allowed typing in octal instructions that themselves would boot an OS off a floppy disk. A professor of mine burned it into PROM for me. I booted it and it had a fatal error... Simple fix, the prof reburned. It worked.

Ok that's all above my pay grade LOL! Nice work.

Or a power surge Wipes everything out

That would be devastating, hours into it.

We had a radio show about computers and in the end the played the code for a game. You taped it on cassette (Google it) and could load it in your C64. 😃

We had a radio station here in New Zealand that did the same thing, I wasn't aware of it at the time, but others indeed recorded the broadcast signal to access programs, utilities and games. Where was your's broadcast from?

The Netherlands 🇳🇱

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Es war trotzdem eine schöne Zeit. Wir durften die Anfänge noch mit erleben. Stundenlang Floppy's kopieren, Giana Sisters zocken, Bierchen trinken, GEOS, eine grafische Oberfläche für den C64 probieren und einfach Spaß haben :-)

Reminds me of programming mastermind into a Texas instruments scientific calculator back in the early 80s.

Nice! I have never heard of doing this on TI calculators.

@silksteele my first computer was a Casio FX-850. 🤓

@silksteele I just looked up the Casio FX-850, I have seen these in magazines in the past, very nice!

I remember doing this with my Sinclair Spectrum.

We were very patient back then LOL!

Well, probably it is more fun to write the code and make it work than to play the game… here it applies that the fun is not the destination but the path

...or the journey. When it worked it was very satisfying.

I did that a few times. 5 minutes into the game you typed in for hours you find out it sucks a$$ and you never play it again 😭

@tobikoenen I had a few of those too, sometimes it was the journey not the destination.

In Poland, there were newspapers that published programs in source code. There was a tool that calculated a checksum for each line, and by comparing it with the one in the newspaper upon entry, errors could be quickly detected.

Deshalb gab es ja spezielle Programme (z.B. MSE) von Zeitschriften, die entsprechende Kontrollcodes mit abdruckten. damit man sehen konnte, in welcher Zeile Tippfehler waren.

I had a Tandy Coco in 1980 when I was 8. I spent hours only imputing lines of code into the computer I must have gone through a 1000 cases of tractor feed paper

WOW! thats a huge amount of coding...and paper. That's something this generation wouldn't have seen before, tractor feed paper... good times!

Most of it was printing out banners with Broderbund Print Shop making flyers and banners I was quite the entrepreneur

You described my weekends when I was 9

Our weekends sounded similar

I remember that pain

The pain was real. Sometimes, it was worth it, when we ended up with a working game, it was a vindication.

It was amazing. We were gods until the computer was turned off an the program was erased from RAM.

I do. In fact it's in the garage somewhere with a broken function key. Plenty of hand typed games on the ZX 81 and the Commodore 64. Whilst we're on the subject of nostalgia. I submitted by 'O' level computer studies project on thermal printed paper from a ZX Spectrum.

Looking back the thermal paper for the ZX Spectrum, was 1) very cool, and 2) very narrow.

thats how I learned programming

I think it also programmed our brains to think logically too

It gave me a good habit of saving progress as our Comodore was in the basement and plugged in to the same circuit as the chest freezer. I would lose everything any time the freezer ran. It wasn’t often, but just enough to wreck your day. I still save a lot even when writing a word document.

We did learn very quickly to save regularly, it just took one time after hours of typing to have your C64 power to play up and that was it.

While you were waiting for the floppy disc to stop snick snicking you could rub your hand across the giant external disc drives air vents on the top to make a loud annoying squeak sound. Good times. I honestly learned a lot of logic from BASIC that came in handy much later in life.

used to do that a lot, became a master at error codes finding and fixing, dammed if I could do it now.

It was amazing how were perservered back then, spending hours looking for errors, fixing them, finding a new one, fixing that.... and on and on. My brain would probably melt down doing it now.

I started on a Commodore Vic-20. I distinctly remember writing BASIC code to use poke and peek to rewrite screen ram (and character arrays) to make video games.

They were good times!

Ahh, but the challenge and the learning experience was in going back through to determine where the mistakes were, correcting them and going for it again. That process is how we got to where we are today.

100% I totally agree, it taught us how to reason, think logically and also outside the box while looking for tiny errors in our typed code.

Typing in a whole BASIC listing taught you a brutal lesson that modern software rarely does, your computer only does exactly what you told it to do. One missing colon, one swapped character, and your "game" becomes a mystery novel with no ending. But that pain had a hidden payoff, you learned to read code like a story and debug like a detective. Those printouts were basically the original "open source community", except the pull request was your eraser and your patience. It also made computers feel honest, the magic was never magic, it was just logic plus discipline. Stuff like the Commodore Computer Museum matters because it preserves that feeling, not just the hardware. If you ever want to time travel back into your own brain, try typing one of those listings again and see what kind of attention span you actually have.

Thank you :) this is my purpose for this X page. I think most of us (and especially the current generation) would struggle spending days typing out a listing and then debugging it for hours.

I used to get Compute's Gazette and spend hours typing in the programs. Occasionally when the air conditioner kicked on the power would flicker and I'd lose an hour of typing. That's how I learned to regularly save my work.

The good ol' days of problem solving.

I am sure this where I learnt problem solving too, you had think logically and outside the box to achieve a working program. Skills that like for many of us, benefited me in my career.

That was the 'fun', spending hours debugging only to find that you'd used a semi colon instead of a regular one In line 14570

I laughed reading this, that happened to me so many times too!

I don’t have to picture it. I lived it. Debugging was borderline impossible for an 8 year old. Little things like quotes vs apostrophe and colon vs semicolon. REVO EMAG is a top memory.

It was the ; : and ' " and , . that got me everytime too.

Oh the memories. Here is the source code for the game I played the most , Commando.

This is next level, that was one of my favourite games!

That’s the point where the debugging began and you really learned something. Typically followed by tinkering with the now working program adapting it with your own improvements. Great times.

I do remember, but it was a lot better than using punched cards!

Punch Cards fascinate me even to today.

Why? 🤓It was a nightmare! I was a student at the time and I was glad to see them replaced by the amber Harris terminal to program the PDP-11, o.a. using VLISP-11. I even trained my professors to use that terminal😅.

That printout reminds me of seeing Production C code in a commercial environment; the printout of that program (only "main"!) stretched from one end of a large room to the other - the idea of modular code was alien to the learn-on-the-job programmer.

The magazines used to have printouts you could type in but I always got something wrong somewhere. A mate got one to work though

And after days of typing rechecking the program listing in the magazine, for the life of you, you couldn't work out why it would work (until the magazine reprinted the program a fe months later due to having errors)