Learning BASIC Like It's 1983
0b10
Two-Bit History
Learning BASIC Like It's 1983
Languages
Hardware
02 Sep 2018
I was not yet alive in 1983. This is something that I occasionally regret. I<br>am especially sorry that I did not experience the 8-bit computer era as it was<br>happening, because I think the people that first encountered computers when<br>they were relatively simple and constrained have a huge advantage over the rest<br>of us.
Today, (almost) everyone knows how to use a computer, but very few people, even<br>in the computing industry, grasp all of what is going on inside of any single<br>machine. There are now so many layers of<br>software doing so many different<br>things that one struggles to identify the parts that are essential. In 1983,<br>though, home computers were unsophisticated enough that a diligent person could<br>learn how a particular computer worked through and through. That person is<br>today probably less mystified than I am by all the abstractions that modern<br>operating systems pile on top of the hardware. I expect that these layers of<br>abstractions were easy to understand one by one as they were introduced; today,<br>new programmers have to try to understand them all by working top to bottom and<br>backward in time.
Many famous programmers, particularly in the video game industry, started<br>programming games in childhood on 8-bit computers like the Apple II and the<br>Commodore 64. John Romero, Richard Garriott, and Chris Roberts are all<br>examples. It’s easy to see how this happened. In the 8-bit computer era, many<br>games were available only as printed BASIC listings in computer magazines and<br>books. If you wanted to<br>play one of those games, you had to type in the whole program by hand.<br>Inevitably, you would get something wrong, so you would have to debug your<br>program. By the time you got it working, you knew enough about how the program<br>functioned to start modifying it yourself. If you were an avid gamer, you<br>became a good programmer almost by necessity.
I also played computer games throughout my childhood. But the games I played<br>came on CD-ROMs. I sometimes found myself having to google how to fix a<br>crashing installer, which would involve editing the Windows Registry or<br>something like that. This kind of minor troubleshooting may have made me<br>comfortable enough with computers to consider studying computer science in<br>college. But it never taught me anything crucial about how computers worked or<br>how to control them.
Now, of course, I tell computers what to do for a living. All the same, I can’t<br>help feeling that I missed out on some fundamental insight afforded only to<br>those that grew up programming simpler computers. What would it have been like<br>to encounter computers for the first time in the early 1980s? How would that<br>have been different from the experience of using a computer today?
This post is going to be a little different from the usual Two-Bit History post<br>because I’m going to try to imagine an answer to these questions.
1983
It was just last week that you saw the Commodore 64<br>ad on TV. Now that M*A*S*H was<br>over, you were in the market for something new to do on Monday nights. This<br>Commodore 64 thing looked even better than the Apple II that Rudy’s family had<br>in their basement. Plus, the ad promised that the new computer would soon bring<br>friends “knocking down” your door. You knew several people at school that would<br>rather be hanging out at your house than Rudy’s anyway, if only they could play<br>Zork there.
So you persuaded your parents to buy one. Your mother said that they would<br>consider it only if having a home computer meant that you stayed away from the<br>arcade. You reluctantly agreed. Your father thought he would start tracking the<br>family’s finances in MultiPlan, the spreadsheet program he had heard about,<br>which is why the computer got put in the living room. A year later, though, you<br>would be the only one still using it. You were finally allowed to put it on the<br>desk in your bedroom, right under your Police poster.
(Your sister protested this decision, but it was 1983 and computers<br>weren’t for<br>her.)
Dad picked it up from<br>ComputerLand on the way home<br>from work. The two of you laid the box down next to the TV and opened it.<br>“WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF FRIENDLY COMPUTING,” said the packaging. Twenty<br>minutes later, you weren’t convinced—the two of you were still trying to<br>connect the Commodore to the TV set and wondering whether the TV’s antenna<br>cable was the 75-ohm or 300-ohm coax type. But eventually you were able to turn<br>your TV to channel 3 and see a grainy, purple image.
READY, the computer reported. Your father pushed the computer toward you,<br>indicating that you should be the first to give it a try. HELLO, you typed,<br>carefully hunting for each letter. The computer’s response was baffling.
You tried typing in a few different words, but the response was always the<br>same. Your father said that you had better read through the rest of the manual.<br>That would be no mean feat—the manual that came...