Imagine such manual translated to Polish, by someone with zero computer knowledge. This was the only manuals available for me, when I was 7 and started learning programming. BTW, this was my main motivation to learn English - better books about computers. With near to zero language talent, learning english was very hard, but books about programming and adventure games (no translated versions available yet)was worth of it.
Legit question: growing up in the 1980s and the whole Cold War thing... I was under the impression that every nation on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain was basically closed off from the West. Later as I got further into 8-bit computers retrospectively, I saw a TON of stuff for the C64/Atari/etc from Poland (and Poland SPECIFICALLY)... did you guys somehow get Ataris/C64s/etc during the 1980s, or was this all in the 1990s after Solidarity and somehow Poland alone got those systems dumped there? But if you guys got it in the 80's... how did _that_ happen? Long story short, knowing what I know about the geopolitical state of the 80's and 90's... it's so fascinating to see Poland specifically being big on those old systems, especially in light of the relative lack of anything from Czech and/or Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania...
@@nickfifteen It was possible to go to West Germany and buy Commdore or Sinclair. Border control oficers was not always aware what it is.. an electric typewriter most often :) Large problem was THE MONEY :p When I was 6, (it was in 1988 just before fall of communist regime in Poland) I well remember that Commodore 64 costed 200$. Salary of engineer was 20$/month. My dad (mining engineer) knew the potential of computers and he wanted me to be familiar with such stuff... My parents spent few years worth savings to by Commodore !!! My current position of "fat cat" in IT company I owe to my dad, who in sad and ugly 80s under soviet regime understood the potential of computer science. Second problem was knowledge. There were no books in Polish, my dad knew German and forced me to leard english (by some 6th sense he knew, that English will be most important, and instead of teaching me German, which he knew, he paid for my english lessons (in public school only "correct" foreign language was ofourse Russian. I don't have language skills and I know my english is crappy even now, but all good books and magazines about computers was in english... so I had motivation to learn. Third problem was software. We were extremely poor country, with none copy-right laws for computer software. So there was no official software distributors. All software exchange was about piracy. We had no culture of intellectual property. Everybody wanted to keep his secrets and sw to himself so there was no free exchange. So... 6-7 years old, Commodore, one book in German (my C= was smuggled from Germany) , big passion for computers and my wonderful dad, best paul and mentor, whom I had to say 'goodbye' two years ago because of heart attack :(
@@nickfifteen I don't know how good automatic translation will be, but there's a great documentary about this times in Poland: ua-cam.com/video/XSb-PPQEU7k/v-deo.html Memories of my 10+ older colleagues, who can tell you more about 80s My 'domain' was rather 90s - Soviet regime has fallen, there was freedom but also big poverty and misery in general.
@@MrocznyTechnik Terribly sorry to hear about your dad. He sounds like he was a great forward thinker. Thank you for a very interesting insight into computing in the east block back in the 80s.
"BALCK Book of C-128... kinda sums it up" Yes, yes it does. It's easy to poke fun at the errors today, but there's something special about the effort; it was obviously well-intentioned. Thank you for sharing. :-)
"It's actually a lot like today where any hoser with a couple hands and a smartphone can make a show about old computers." Bob & Doug: "Oh, take off, eh!"
I wrote a manual for the PCBoard Programming Language (a scripting language I developed for PCBoard back when I was an employee of its publisher). I like to think it wasn't this amateurish, but it was just an in house effort, no formal editor, and it is a bit embarrassing to go through all these years later to see the typos and copy and paste blocks that were to be edited but got skipped... Writing is hard. I like to think I'd do a better job today, but it is still tedious.
I guess the author wanted to give people the same experience they had by requiring them to compile their own notebooks full of corrections and clarifications for The Black Book
My best friend/neighbor got my C64 smuggled by a trucker to Yugoslavia from Germany without a datasette or disk drive. I had a few books in German, Italian or English, but I didn't speak any of them. Imagine every morning hunting words in dictionaries and typing programs in the C64 until afternoon. The worst part is when you turn off the computer everything is lost, tomorrow you must start from the beginning. That didn't stop me slightest. I learned BASIC in one month. After that, I finally bought C64 with a datasette and some kind of cartridge with Turbo tape, Assembler, Simons Basic, and a reset button. That was a revelation, finally, I got two crucial books in the Croatian language C64 Memory map and 6502 Assembly (the worst translation ever). But with that and some weekly magazines (Svet kompjutera (World of Computers)), I was able to teach myself the Maschine language. Imagine how today's kids would react if every time they want to play a game like Pong first they must enter a BASIC listing without any mistake.
I'll be honest, when I clicked on this I thought to myself "well, it can't be that bad anyway" and of course I was wrong. Even some of the parts that are more or less technically correct were worded in a very confusing way. It seems like "trial and error" part from the color chart lede should have been this book's motto. Great video as usual!
Im happy I dint got to learn C++ in this style atleast, and the BASIC book I had as a child was a bit easier. XD Same idea I had starting to watch this. "couldnt be that bad right? 52 minutes of technicall nerdism?" first 10 minutes "ow boy, this truly seems like a notebook from granny computer nerd writing this on the very computer she wrote it aboot" wait "about" also, no long storys in this one, "no wasted pages" why did I even comment? (igor, your comment could have been mine :D thx i sht up now)
Such terrible documentation drives me crazy! I've wasted so much time over the years through misdirection or vague descriptions of systems. I care deeply about correct content expressed well. Programmers have to be so pedantic with code so it puzzles me why so many stop short of mastering their native tongue. Anyway, despite this, or perhaps because of this I thoroughly enjoyed this critique! Thanks Robin.
"Cornor" sounds like the evil wizard that burned down the village, and only you and your scrappy band of loincloth-clad adventurers can challenge his power and restore peace
@@MendicantMonkey Robert can't be the son of Dell because the surnames start with different letters. Anyway she mentions that her kids were using the computer so a kid is unlikely to be writing a reference book.....
@@johnbos4637 I took the "H" in "Robert H." to be the middle initial. If so, it could have been written "Dell & Robert H. Taylor" to be less confusing. Another poor editing choice? She probably wanted to put her son first. The paragraph about her son helping to finish the book ends with, "a hug goes to Robert," but indeed it's never explicit that it is the name of her son. I didn't get the impression he was young, though. She signs the section 'granny', after all.
@@MendicantMonkey She mentioned her kids took the 128 and were playing with it and she had to buy a 2nd one. Kids live with parents, older kids move out. Since kids are there playing with the 128 they are young. No granny would be using a 128 in 1985/86. She's no granny, she has young kids and no kid is going to be writing a book. It definitely was NOT written as "Dell & Robert H. Taylor". You're making assumptions that have no factual evidence to suggest the connection. You are now just making up stuff to act smart. Here's a hint... you're not.
@@johnbos4637 I didn't intend my comments to be an attack. We can disagree with civility. However, I don't think it's anymore an assumption to think Robert may be her son than it is to assume his age. He could certainly have been a teenager. That it is this vague is another curse of the poor editing of this book.
Even though being a woman is no reason (and never has been, on the contrary) for leniency. I think it is of merit that the author was obviously an outsider, lexically challenged, who ventured into an already crowded (and male dominated) field with a lot of confidence, spunk, and energy, self-advertising and independent, empowered publishing included. All that is laudable. Error-ridden result is still full worthy of your attention and the attention of your viewership. Again, thank you.
This goes to show how everyone learns differently, and maybe points out the shortcomings of other books and reference guides. There is clearly much about the C64 and/or 128 that this person "learned" but never fully understood about how it worked. When 6-year-old me was first learning to program in BASIC on the C64, I learned that by typing POKE 53281, 1 I could change the background color of the screen to white, and if I wanted other colors, I could either look it up in the User's Guide, or try different numbers until I found a color I liked. It was much later (probably age 8) that I understood that 53281 was a register on the VIC-II that controlled that specific aspect of the screen display. All that needed to happen is for someone to pick any specific topic from this book and ask the author, "Explain why or how this works." If the answer is, "I don't know. I just know that's what I'm supposed to type," then they probably aren't ready to be publishing a book about it.
Just imagine the frustration and confusion that this 'reference book' would have caused an unsuspecting reader desperate to improve their knowledge of the hardware.
Did anyone else notice how they did the typesetting? The whole book is written in a monospaced font, and in order to keep it all full-justified, they just worded and punctuated everything in such a way that it naturally lines up. That's where most of the random commas and unnatural wording seems to have come from. Sadly, the marketing text for this book had a point; I've started going through scans of some of those third-party programming books, and they do tend to waste a lot of pages regurgitating what was already in the official manuals. Too bad this is one of them!
Microsoft documentation in general is pretty terrible. It's just walls of unbroken text and/or poorly formatted text and/or utterly broken. Select for System.Linq.Queryable is a fine example: it's listed as two methods with different signatures in Queryable. Click one of the methods and now you're on a page where both methods are now listed as overloads and there is no definition for Select despite the nav button for definition being there. It's bafflingly bad.
@@benanderson89 That's the truth! Navigation is so poor, examples (when actually given) are convoluted, buggy or wrong. The search feature was implemented better 20 years ago. And to top it off, you can determine the decade by the layout code, like they're geological layers. I'm not for sure when it started going so far downhill but it's gotten pretty terrible. Some of the articles make this look fantastic.
This was super funny. It's always fun to go on a fault finding mission. It's clear that this book probably made sense to the person who wrote it. But as a reference it's useless. The multiple different references to "register" in the SID section would have complete confused me if I didn't already know. I'm going to quickly go on amazon to NOT find this book.
Yes, me too, a little bit. Her goal was right, but teaching your son through your hand written notes is not the same as publishing a book (a book that wants to be the best reference book).
If it was a work of fiction, I could almost agree. However, this is intended to be a reference book, professionally published to make profit. Readers would have been mislead and given insufficient information to achieve their aims. Imagine you bought a textbook and failed your class, would you still feel sympathy for the author?
I've spent way too much time in my life reading old Compute!'s Gazette magazines. Love finding videos that show the products that were sold by fly-by-night "companies" such as this book. Thanks for this!
I was half expecting Robin to calmly say: “I think I’m going to just have to set fire to this book…” followed by him lighting it on fire and giggling uncontrollably.
In a way, it's charming: A middle-aged/elderly woman ("granny") keeping log of what she found out while struggling with the machine and of what noteworthy information she picked up in other publications. Also an effort in organizing it and transcending personal use and understanding - which is also, where it starts transcending meaning. Pretty much the Web before the Web. :-)
I've become so cynical that I found myself wondering if Dell Taylor actually existed, or if this book was just an early example of making up twee stories to sell your product.
The commas seem to have been inserted to prevent having to use an extra space as the font and typesetting used is fixed position and fixed width. So it doesn’t allow for justified margins both left and right. Personally I’d have gone for the extra spaces (especially so in lines with a full stop already) or just had a ragged right margin.
This feels a lot like a product in the 80's actually. Many coded from their bedroom, there obviously wasn't any Internet and making a book like this was likely also possible in that way. Back then you could find a publisher that had no clue about computers, publish just about anything. In that context, I'd give this some slack, however even then I wonder if it was popular in any way. :) I wonder if the writer was simply dyslexic.
Yeah, I've always felt like this book was the result of scanning personal notes and trusting in OCR a bit too much to not do things like mistake stray pen/pencil marks as commas or make 0's out of B's. The appearance of lack of editing/proofreading makes this book painful. Made the mistake of referring someone to a chart in this book -- the chart was correct, and thankfully certain folk were quick to remind me that not much else was... :P
I experience this in my daily work and it is exhausting to deal with. It displays an arrogance on the part of the author. They lack an understanding of the content they're writing about but are not self aware enough to recognise it. They elevate their ability in comparing it to others, not realising the effort and experience that went into what others have done. They brag about the book being concise while including useless information about themselves, that only they would find interesting. I find it is disrespectful to the reader to be so indifferent to accuracy. But this only demonstrates their own comprehension ability - as they assume other's abilities are equal or lesser, they don't see a problem. The use of commas is very indicative - "I see commas used in these books - they must be important so I'll just stick some in my writing too!". I doubt the author was ever an accomplished programmer. Your sigh at 31:45 is the greatest moment. Thank you for putting yourself through this. If you have any tips about how you deal with this in your line of work, I'd really like to know!
The author thinks that a comma means to pause, as in to take a breath, so they put commas in everywhere they would take a breath or pause for emphasis if they were dictating.
Great rant, and that's a lot of wrong for one book. :D Thinking of the poor souls that tried to learn programming from it back in the day. @17:45 I think they get a pass on this particular one (using a space to show it's not a single token). It's similar enough to page 33 of COMPUTE!'s Programming the Commodore 64 The Definitive Guide: "Token $A1 (161) then $23 (35). This is GET then #; GET# has no token of its own."
All of those grammatical mistakes were frustrating. Also, I completely remember seeing that RUN magazine ad. I have a genuine soft spot for those magazine ads in those times - truly the 'wild west' of publishing.
Some people have no business writing technical guides. Most people really, it's a very particular skill that requires deep understanding but most of all, conciseness and clarity. I once just rewrote an entire book about iPad because the original text that I was hired to update was so bad I just refused to work with it.
I’m 10 minutes in, on the “how to use” page cringing and wondering why the author didn’t let a native English speaker proof-read it. Please tell me English isn’t her native language!
There's some truth in advertising for this book. It literally is a collection of scrap notes and torn pages typed out into a book. And all the grammar of the average Twitter user. Amazing.
In the section about the SID chip, I think the author uses the term Register in its muscal sense, where it usually means a certain range of notes that an instrument or a singer can produce. For example, the human voice is divided into Bass, Barytone, Tenor, Alto, Mezzo-Soprano, and Soprano registers. On church organs and related instruments, it also has the added meaning of timbre, e.g. Diapason.
Hey Robin! I really love the videos and you are now my favorite C64 channel. Where can we either download your end of video music or purchase it? I find myself listening to the music over and over and it would be great to have some of your stuff to play back-to-back while I’m tinkering on my Ultimate64. Hope all my commas are in the correct locations. 😉
Thanks, a bunch of my music is here: ua-cam.com/users/BedfordLvlExperiment and bedfordlevelexperiment.bandcamp.com/ Some of the songs I've been using for the video credits haven't been released at all though; eventually I'll try to get those bundled together into another album.
According to tbe book itself, it was written by a delusional housewife who bought a C128 so she could copy the user's manual into her own book without using the C128 at all. It takes a severe narcissist to think people need you to tell them what's in the user's manual they already have.
Just reading the back cover, I see a comma where it makes no sense and a fragment. That makes me suspicious of the writing within. Remember, until fairly recently, published books were made by professionals with a lot of effort, and that included careful copy editing and line editing. In the 80s there was a much higher standard of literacy. Continuing the video, I see you found that is the case. 8:40 Wow, that writer really doesn't know how to use commas! Why can't people simply ask someone -- anyone -- to review the text before publishing?
Remember, it could be worse. I could be X number of totally blank pages, or it could be just random pages written in Mandarin Chinese, Klingon, or Dwarvish (or all three)! You have to keep perspective here. A good sense of humor helps, too. 😋 Or it could be a long string of 1’s and 0’s, that you have to break into 8-bit bytes, and POKE into the memory of a CBM Pet, which turns it into an interactive ad application for the book in question! Wouldn’t that be a hoot?
Considering that the vast majority of the commenters here is in the masculine domain and the early era of home computing, just like the present, is also (still) dominated by men, I think it should be of note (no reason for leniency) that the author of the book was a woman. On a different note: I want to thank you for your book club! I love seeing these books in their materiality, with details of contents and typography, presented by a very engaging and friendly voice. Also you seem to take great care of your fingernails!
On one hand it's important to know your limitations, on the other it's impossible not to admire his DIY spirit. He might have turned some people off of coding, which is tragic, but at least it's loaded with clues that the author is a teenager and/or alcoholic that even the non-computer literate could pick up on.
This book has the same vibes as random UA-cam programming tutorials "Recorded with HyperCam 2", with a notepad document to type the dialogue instead of speaking. You get the feeling that an idiot is trying to teach you. The worst thing about bad programming books is that you eagerly learn incorrect information which you have to painstakingly unlearn later, so this book doesn't deserve some "A for effort" reward. It is harmful and does damage to new programmers. It was fun seeing you rip into it.
Another comment here summed it up perfectly: "how many kids in the 80's bought this book and gave up on their dreams of becoming programmers and instead became heroin addicts"
Not gonna lie, I *really* want to see a concert with 76 C64s marching on parade.
3 роки тому+2
Wow. This book's style and quality reminds me my own childhood notes on C64 programming, which were eeeer not always accurate and sometimes only guessworks ... :)
The only really good C128 book I'm aware of is the Commodore 128 Programmer's Reference Guide. It's on archive dot org if you can't find a physical copy. There may be others but I haven't explored what's available for the C128 nearly as deeply as the C64's library.
I was pretty understanding for 50 minutes, I wrote way too many pages of non-comprehensible "manuals" for work and hobby stuff. Knowledge transfer is a hard thing. But then I saw BALCK BOOK. Listen, you need to get your title right.
If it helps things make any sense: In music, an instrument might have multiple "registers" where the tone quality is different. A clarinet, for example, has a "register key" that must be held open to play high notes, and these have a somewhat different texture to the lower notes. I suspect this is the meaning intended when referring to the voice registers.
A better title would've been the nefarious tome of bbs myths. It really does read like those brag sessions written by those who tried to impress everyone but really knew nothing.
I remember that the C64 systems in high school, even with the 1701 monitor, would show illegible characters under maximum contrast of black characters and white background. At home I just used an old B&W TV most of the time (and only occasionally taking the system to the living room colour set) as we couldn't afford the proper monitor if we didn't absolutely require it.
This is quite a lovely memory. I do understand the purpose of the book and why it was formatted the way it was. I do agree with the editors lacking though. The intent was good.
I think the "UNUSED" locations on pages 46-47 are the unused zero-page locations, so there is actually something of use to programmers of assembly-language on the Commodore machines. That said, the Balck Book is dreadful indeed. From the anecdotes, I suspect this was a family project, so having the manuscript professionally reviewed and copyedited was likely out of the budget. I would describe the book as half-complete. An enormous effort would be needed to get the book into a proper state for publication. Barriers to entry exist for a reason!
With the built-in serial routines, just 1200 baud in 1 Mhz mode and 2400 baud in 2 Mhz. With custom serial code routines (I think Novaterm 9.6 had this?) I've heard up to 9600 bps. With a Swiftlink or Turbo 232 cartridge (hardware UART) it can go to 38400 or higher.
The fact that BBSes are mentioned suggests that the author had a modem; hence a modem manual. That's *maybe* where some of the weird stuff in the glossary might be from - it struck me as being signal processing-y.
So you're trashing granny's little computer book just because it's full of errors? ;) Right on! I for one applaud the new spelling variant of cornor though. Looks a lot edgior than the old and familior version. We should definitely considor dumping the ending "-er" altogethor, as this would make the English langwich simplor, coolor and easior to lurn, thus making it more accessible to foreignors. The switch would benefit programmors and usors alike, and the new spelling would be much more in line with othor computor words like cursor, monitor or parsor. Additionally, "e" is a charactor that commonly produces errors on many typewritors and printors, especially if the tonor cartridge is running low on color.
Oh, God. It is okay to make yourself notes, scribbles which you understand, you can use, that are not complete, not exact, but YOU know how to use them. I have had many, and sometimes I have to throw them out because even I forgot what it meant :D But publishing as a book and advertised in a way that was in the beggining of the video? That must be much more precise than that. Many of the errors and mistakes are unforgivable. When you publish a book, you become a source of information. It was even worse in the old days when these were the main source, not the internet...
TBH, I see this book as a work of art. It has a really cool backstory. the writer might not have been the best writer there is; but they actually wanted to help people other than their children. I admire the writer and see each mistake as a reminder of the human element. It has translation errors and non-formal language which are relatable and make the book feel more personal.
Imagine such manual translated to Polish, by someone with zero computer knowledge. This was the only manuals available for me, when I was 7 and started learning programming. BTW, this was my main motivation to learn English - better books about computers. With near to zero language talent, learning english was very hard, but books about programming and adventure games (no translated versions available yet)was worth of it.
And programming become true discovery ...
Legit question: growing up in the 1980s and the whole Cold War thing... I was under the impression that every nation on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain was basically closed off from the West. Later as I got further into 8-bit computers retrospectively, I saw a TON of stuff for the C64/Atari/etc from Poland (and Poland SPECIFICALLY)... did you guys somehow get Ataris/C64s/etc during the 1980s, or was this all in the 1990s after Solidarity and somehow Poland alone got those systems dumped there? But if you guys got it in the 80's... how did _that_ happen?
Long story short, knowing what I know about the geopolitical state of the 80's and 90's... it's so fascinating to see Poland specifically being big on those old systems, especially in light of the relative lack of anything from Czech and/or Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania...
@@nickfifteen It was possible to go to West Germany and buy Commdore or Sinclair. Border control oficers was not always aware what it is.. an electric typewriter most often :) Large problem was THE MONEY :p When I was 6, (it was in 1988 just before fall of communist regime in Poland) I well remember that Commodore 64 costed 200$. Salary of engineer was 20$/month. My dad (mining engineer) knew the potential of computers and he wanted me to be familiar with such stuff... My parents spent few years worth savings to by Commodore !!! My current position of "fat cat" in IT company I owe to my dad, who in sad and ugly 80s under soviet regime understood the potential of computer science. Second problem was knowledge. There were no books in Polish, my dad knew German and forced me to leard english (by some 6th sense he knew, that English will be most important, and instead of teaching me German, which he knew, he paid for my english lessons (in public school only "correct" foreign language was ofourse Russian. I don't have language skills and I know my english is crappy even now, but all good books and magazines about computers was in english... so I had motivation to learn. Third problem was software. We were extremely poor country, with none copy-right laws for computer software. So there was no official software distributors. All software exchange was about piracy. We had no culture of intellectual property. Everybody wanted to keep his secrets and sw to himself so there was no free exchange. So... 6-7 years old, Commodore, one book in German (my C= was smuggled from Germany) , big passion for computers and my wonderful dad, best paul and mentor, whom I had to say 'goodbye' two years ago because of heart attack :(
@@nickfifteen I don't know how good automatic translation will be, but there's a great documentary about this times in Poland:
ua-cam.com/video/XSb-PPQEU7k/v-deo.html
Memories of my 10+ older colleagues, who can tell you more about 80s My 'domain' was rather 90s - Soviet regime has fallen, there was freedom but also big poverty and misery in general.
@@MrocznyTechnik Terribly sorry to hear about your dad. He sounds like he was a great forward thinker.
Thank you for a very interesting insight into computing in the east block back in the 80s.
"BALCK Book of C-128... kinda sums it up" Yes, yes it does. It's easy to poke fun at the errors today, but there's something special about the effort; it was obviously well-intentioned. Thank you for sharing. :-)
"One forgotten comma, " - the best part of the video!
"It's actually a lot like today where any hoser with a couple hands and a smartphone can make a show about old computers."
Bob & Doug: "Oh, take off, eh!"
This made me chuckle too.
"any hoser with a couple hands"
tell me you're Canadian without saying you're Canadian
Exhausting and hilarious, thanks for putting yourself through that.
I wrote a manual for the PCBoard Programming Language (a scripting language I developed for PCBoard back when I was an employee of its publisher). I like to think it wasn't this amateurish, but it was just an in house effort, no formal editor, and it is a bit embarrassing to go through all these years later to see the typos and copy and paste blocks that were to be edited but got skipped...
Writing is hard. I like to think I'd do a better job today, but it is still tedious.
I died at "THREE AVAILABLE KEYBOARDS". I have an image of a "hacker" with hood over his head and three C64s connected to one display xD.
It's better than 2 people typing on the same keyboard to stop a hacker.
ua-cam.com/video/msX4oAXpvUE/v-deo.html
I guess the author wanted to give people the same experience they had by requiring them to compile their own notebooks full of corrections and clarifications for The Black Book
Not just any hoser with a phone, Robin. An entertaining Canadian hoser.
My best friend/neighbor got my C64 smuggled by a trucker to Yugoslavia from Germany without a datasette or disk drive. I had a few books in German, Italian or English, but I didn't speak any of them. Imagine every morning hunting words in dictionaries and typing programs in the C64 until afternoon. The worst part is when you turn off the computer everything is lost, tomorrow you must start from the beginning. That didn't stop me slightest. I learned BASIC in one month. After that, I finally bought C64 with a datasette and some kind of cartridge with Turbo tape, Assembler, Simons Basic, and a reset button. That was a revelation, finally, I got two crucial books in the Croatian language C64 Memory map and 6502 Assembly (the worst translation ever). But with that and some weekly magazines (Svet kompjutera (World of Computers)), I was able to teach myself the Maschine language. Imagine how today's kids would react if every time they want to play a game like Pong first they must enter a BASIC listing without any mistake.
LOL'd at "Any hoser with a cell phone"
Came to the comments only to like this one
I'll be honest, when I clicked on this I thought to myself "well, it can't be that bad anyway" and of course I was wrong. Even some of the parts that are more or less technically correct were worded in a very confusing way. It seems like "trial and error" part from the color chart lede should have been this book's motto.
Great video as usual!
Im happy I dint got to learn C++ in this style atleast, and the BASIC book I had as a child was a bit easier. XD Same idea I had starting to watch this. "couldnt be that bad right? 52 minutes of technicall nerdism?" first 10 minutes "ow boy, this truly seems like a notebook from granny computer nerd writing this on the very computer she wrote it aboot" wait "about" also, no long storys in this one, "no wasted pages"
why did I even comment? (igor, your comment could have been mine :D thx i sht up now)
Such terrible documentation drives me crazy! I've wasted so much time over the years through misdirection or vague descriptions of systems. I care deeply about correct content expressed well. Programmers have to be so pedantic with code so it puzzles me why so many stop short of mastering their native tongue. Anyway, despite this, or perhaps because of this I thoroughly enjoyed this critique! Thanks Robin.
"Cornor" sounds like the evil wizard that burned down the village, and only you and your scrappy band of loincloth-clad adventurers can challenge his power and restore peace
I thought that showed that the C64 was so powerful it could identify the medical cause of death.
You forgot that it turns out that you are the Chosen One.
It's so bad that Robert H. doesn't want his full name on the cover.
I'd have to guess Robert was the son of Dell, given the introduction/foreword. But you might have nailed it there.
@@MendicantMonkey Robert can't be the son of Dell because the surnames start with different letters. Anyway she mentions that her kids were using the computer so a kid is unlikely to be writing a reference book.....
@@johnbos4637 I took the "H" in "Robert H." to be the middle initial. If so, it could have been written "Dell & Robert H. Taylor" to be less confusing. Another poor editing choice? She probably wanted to put her son first. The paragraph about her son helping to finish the book ends with, "a hug goes to Robert," but indeed it's never explicit that it is the name of her son. I didn't get the impression he was young, though. She signs the section 'granny', after all.
@@MendicantMonkey She mentioned her kids took the 128 and were playing with it and she had to buy a 2nd one. Kids live with parents, older kids move out. Since kids are there playing with the 128 they are young. No granny would be using a 128 in 1985/86. She's no granny, she has young kids and no kid is going to be writing a book. It definitely was NOT written as "Dell & Robert H. Taylor". You're making assumptions that have no factual evidence to suggest the connection. You are now just making up stuff to act smart. Here's a hint... you're not.
@@johnbos4637 I didn't intend my comments to be an attack. We can disagree with civility. However, I don't think it's anymore an assumption to think Robert may be her son than it is to assume his age. He could certainly have been a teenager. That it is this vague is another curse of the poor editing of this book.
34:26 - Damn, here I was reading manuals and crap when I could have just poked 255 into the basic skill address location..
Even though being a woman is no reason (and never has been, on the contrary) for leniency. I think it is of merit that the author was obviously an outsider, lexically challenged, who ventured into an already crowded (and male dominated) field with a lot of confidence, spunk, and energy, self-advertising and independent, empowered publishing included. All that is laudable. Error-ridden result is still full worthy of your attention and the attention of your viewership. Again, thank you.
This goes to show how everyone learns differently, and maybe points out the shortcomings of other books and reference guides. There is clearly much about the C64 and/or 128 that this person "learned" but never fully understood about how it worked.
When 6-year-old me was first learning to program in BASIC on the C64, I learned that by typing POKE 53281, 1 I could change the background color of the screen to white, and if I wanted other colors, I could either look it up in the User's Guide, or try different numbers until I found a color I liked. It was much later (probably age 8) that I understood that 53281 was a register on the VIC-II that controlled that specific aspect of the screen display.
All that needed to happen is for someone to pick any specific topic from this book and ask the author, "Explain why or how this works." If the answer is, "I don't know. I just know that's what I'm supposed to type," then they probably aren't ready to be publishing a book about it.
Just imagine the frustration and confusion that this 'reference book' would have caused an unsuspecting reader desperate to improve their knowledge of the hardware.
Yeah especially when you compare it to the excellent Dan Heeb Tool Kit books.
Did anyone else notice how they did the typesetting? The whole book is written in a monospaced font, and in order to keep it all full-justified, they just worded and punctuated everything in such a way that it naturally lines up. That's where most of the random commas and unnatural wording seems to have come from.
Sadly, the marketing text for this book had a point; I've started going through scans of some of those third-party programming books, and they do tend to waste a lot of pages regurgitating what was already in the official manuals. Too bad this is one of them!
Some MSDN-level documentation right there.
Microsoft documentation in general is pretty terrible. It's just walls of unbroken text and/or poorly formatted text and/or utterly broken.
Select for System.Linq.Queryable is a fine example: it's listed as two methods with different signatures in Queryable. Click one of the methods and now you're on a page where both methods are now listed as overloads and there is no definition for Select despite the nav button for definition being there. It's bafflingly bad.
@@benanderson89 That's the truth! Navigation is so poor, examples (when actually given) are convoluted, buggy or wrong. The search feature was implemented better 20 years ago. And to top it off, you can determine the decade by the layout code, like they're geological layers. I'm not for sure when it started going so far downhill but it's gotten pretty terrible. Some of the articles make this look fantastic.
Back in the day we used to call it “More Stupid Developer News”.
I found MSDN to be better when it was offline. It was a proper reference then.
@15:49 "... but doesn't tell you how to convert it to a useful number."
The saddest part of that book is that there were two authors, neither of which checked what was written, and they were paid to write that.
This was super funny. It's always fun to go on a fault finding mission. It's clear that this book probably made sense to the person who wrote it. But as a reference it's useless. The multiple different references to "register" in the SID section would have complete confused me if I didn't already know.
I'm going to quickly go on amazon to NOT find this book.
I honestly feel bad for the grandma who spent ages compiling all the information and you just metaphorically rip the book apart
Yes, me too, a little bit. Her goal was right, but teaching your son through your hand written notes is not the same as publishing a book (a book that wants to be the best reference book).
If it was a work of fiction, I could almost agree. However, this is intended to be a reference book, professionally published to make profit. Readers would have been mislead and given insufficient information to achieve their aims. Imagine you bought a textbook and failed your class, would you still feel sympathy for the author?
how many kids in the 80's bought this book and gave up on their dreams of becoming programmers and instead became heroin addicts
This book was written in a manner.
Joking aside, I kind of love this book. It definitely has character.
As long as, comma they are not “graphics” characters.
I've spent way too much time in my life reading old Compute!'s Gazette magazines. Love finding videos that show the products that were sold by fly-by-night "companies" such as this book. Thanks for this!
This was a bloodbath. I do like the binding of this book. Very practical :)
I prefer spiral binding, but this comb binding is certainly better than "perfect" binding.
29:42 PEEK with a 2nd value haha, I was CRYING watching that
I have to admit I giggled every time you paused at one of the errant commas.
Well, I was entertained and I don't even have a Commodore.
I was half expecting Robin to calmly say: “I think I’m going to just have to set fire to this book…” followed by him lighting it on fire and giggling uncontrollably.
"I don't even know why I did this" I don't even know why I watched this!
I'm glad everyone is taking this as me kidding, I really enjoyed the deep dive into this bit of historical documentation. :)
In a way, it's charming: A middle-aged/elderly woman ("granny") keeping log of what she found out while struggling with the machine and of what noteworthy information she picked up in other publications. Also an effort in organizing it and transcending personal use and understanding - which is also, where it starts transcending meaning.
Pretty much the Web before the Web. :-)
I've become so cynical that I found myself wondering if Dell Taylor actually existed, or if this book was just an early example of making up twee stories to sell your product.
To be fair, Commodore consistently wrote "kernal", which makes "cornor" just a little less egregious.
Needs a follow-up video to show what running POKE 120,0 does on C64 and C128. I loved how you said "Computer will go crazy"!
Haha that intonation (35:05) reminds me of Dr. Steve Brule.
I tested it in VICE. It stops enter from running the selected line in BASIC, softlocking the computer.
The commas seem to have been inserted to prevent having to use an extra space as the font and typesetting used is fixed position and fixed width. So it doesn’t allow for justified margins both left and right.
Personally I’d have gone for the extra spaces (especially so in lines with a full stop already) or just had a ragged right margin.
This feels a lot like a product in the 80's actually. Many coded from their bedroom, there obviously wasn't any Internet and making a book like this was likely also possible in that way. Back then you could find a publisher that had no clue about computers, publish just about anything. In that context, I'd give this some slack, however even then I wonder if it was popular in any way. :) I wonder if the writer was simply dyslexic.
The author, likes commas, in, his tid-bits,, apparently, don't, you?
If, in doubt just, put a comma you'll, get it, right eventually.
This is one of my favorite little cornors of UA-cam ;)
Yeah, I've always felt like this book was the result of scanning personal notes and trusting in OCR a bit too much to not do things like mistake stray pen/pencil marks as commas or make 0's out of B's. The appearance of lack of editing/proofreading makes this book painful. Made the mistake of referring someone to a chart in this book -- the chart was correct, and thankfully certain folk were quick to remind me that not much else was... :P
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This is awesome, thanks for the laugh.
I experience this in my daily work and it is exhausting to deal with. It displays an arrogance on the part of the author. They lack an understanding of the content they're writing about but are not self aware enough to recognise it. They elevate their ability in comparing it to others, not realising the effort and experience that went into what others have done. They brag about the book being concise while including useless information about themselves, that only they would find interesting. I find it is disrespectful to the reader to be so indifferent to accuracy. But this only demonstrates their own comprehension ability - as they assume other's abilities are equal or lesser, they don't see a problem. The use of commas is very indicative - "I see commas used in these books - they must be important so I'll just stick some in my writing too!". I doubt the author was ever an accomplished programmer. Your sigh at 31:45 is the greatest moment. Thank you for putting yourself through this. If you have any tips about how you deal with this in your line of work, I'd really like to know!
Dunning-Kruger effect strikes again!
@@diamondsmasher Yes, the whole internet now references Dunning-Kruger. So proud of everyone...
Tips? You can't _deal_ with it at all. You just have to weather it. That's my tip.
The author thinks that a comma means to pause, as in to take a breath, so they put commas in everywhere they would take a breath or pause for emphasis if they were dictating.
Great rant, and that's a lot of wrong for one book. :D Thinking of the poor souls that tried to learn programming from it back in the day.
@17:45 I think they get a pass on this particular one (using a space to show it's not a single token). It's similar enough to page 33 of COMPUTE!'s Programming the Commodore 64 The Definitive Guide:
"Token $A1 (161) then $23 (35). This is GET then #; GET# has no token of its own."
The nicest, most soft-spoken, Canadian UA-camr (that I watch) ripping into a book with his superior knowledge is very funny.
All of those grammatical mistakes were frustrating.
Also, I completely remember seeing that RUN magazine ad. I have a genuine soft spot for those magazine ads in those times - truly the 'wild west' of publishing.
Some people have no business writing technical guides. Most people really, it's a very particular skill that requires deep understanding but most of all, conciseness and clarity. I once just rewrote an entire book about iPad because the original text that I was hired to update was so bad I just refused to work with it.
Comma, is a hard punction mark to use.
*punction*
Poke 120,0 -- "Computer will go crazy." -- Best reference manual ever.
I’m 10 minutes in, on the “how to use” page cringing and wondering why the author didn’t let a native English speaker proof-read it. Please tell me English isn’t her native language!
There's some truth in advertising for this book. It literally is a collection of scrap notes and torn pages typed out into a book. And all the grammar of the average Twitter user. Amazing.
"Maybe editors aren't such a bad idea. You know, maybe I should use an editor. Why'd I even make this episode?" lol
That's funny! 😀You crack me up.
18:35 I lost it there. The irony was so delicious.
Wow, that was painful. But now I know how much the 1571 weighs!
I don't think this is important.
I watch this video multiple times to hear "any hoser" in context. Gets me every time.
In the section about the SID chip, I think the author uses the term Register in its muscal sense, where it usually means a certain range of notes that an instrument or a singer can produce. For example, the human voice is divided into Bass, Barytone, Tenor, Alto, Mezzo-Soprano, and Soprano registers.
On church organs and related instruments, it also has the added meaning of timbre, e.g. Diapason.
I love your reference to hosers. I can tell you’re a proud Canadian. Good day eh!
They went far above their heads.
Take a drink for every, miss placed comma.
I know a few of those hosers...
Dunning and Kruger would be proud, comma,
Hey Robin! I really love the videos and you are now my favorite C64 channel. Where can we either download your end of video music or purchase it? I find myself listening to the music over and over and it would be great to have some of your stuff to play back-to-back while I’m tinkering on my Ultimate64. Hope all my commas are in the correct locations. 😉
Thanks, a bunch of my music is here: ua-cam.com/users/BedfordLvlExperiment and bedfordlevelexperiment.bandcamp.com/
Some of the songs I've been using for the video credits haven't been released at all though; eventually I'll try to get those bundled together into another album.
I am impressed with your knowledge Robin :)
According to tbe book itself, it was written by a delusional housewife who bought a C128 so she could copy the user's manual into her own book without using the C128 at all. It takes a severe narcissist to think people need you to tell them what's in the user's manual they already have.
I don’t know how someone could decide that it’s a good idea to write a piece of technical documentation for a device they’ve never actually used
Just reading the back cover, I see a comma where it makes no sense and a fragment. That makes me suspicious of the writing within.
Remember, until fairly recently, published books were made by professionals with a lot of effort, and that included careful copy editing and line editing. In the 80s there was a much higher standard of literacy.
Continuing the video, I see you found that is the case.
8:40 Wow, that writer really doesn't know how to use commas! Why can't people simply ask someone -- anyone -- to review the text before publishing?
"uh... I don't even know why I did this" made me laugh :)
Remember, it could be worse. I could be X number of totally blank pages, or it could be just random pages written in Mandarin Chinese, Klingon, or Dwarvish (or all three)! You have to keep perspective here. A good sense of humor helps, too. 😋 Or it could be a long string of 1’s and 0’s, that you have to break into 8-bit bytes, and POKE into the memory of a CBM Pet, which turns it into an interactive ad application for the book in question! Wouldn’t that be a hoot?
Considering that the vast majority of the commenters here is in the masculine domain and the early era of home computing, just like the present, is also (still) dominated by men, I think it should be of note (no reason for leniency) that the author of the book was a woman.
On a different note: I want to thank you for your book club! I love seeing these books in their materiality, with details of contents and typography, presented by a very engaging and friendly voice. Also you seem to take great care of your fingernails!
Those commas, are killing me.
On one hand it's important to know your limitations, on the other it's impossible not to admire his DIY spirit. He might have turned some people off of coding, which is tragic, but at least it's loaded with clues that the author is a teenager and/or alcoholic that even the non-computer literate could pick up on.
This book has the same vibes as random UA-cam programming tutorials "Recorded with HyperCam 2", with a notepad document to type the dialogue instead of speaking. You get the feeling that an idiot is trying to teach you. The worst thing about bad programming books is that you eagerly learn incorrect information which you have to painstakingly unlearn later, so this book doesn't deserve some "A for effort" reward. It is harmful and does damage to new programmers. It was fun seeing you rip into it.
Another comment here summed it up perfectly: "how many kids in the 80's bought this book and gave up on their dreams of becoming programmers and instead became heroin addicts"
Not gonna lie, I *really* want to see a concert with 76 C64s marching on parade.
Wow. This book's style and quality reminds me my own childhood notes on C64 programming, which were eeeer not always accurate and sometimes only guessworks ... :)
Robin, can you recommend an outstanding book for the C-128 that no one should be without? A kind of 'has-it-all' or 'teaches-it-all' volume? Thanks
The only really good C128 book I'm aware of is the Commodore 128 Programmer's Reference Guide. It's on archive dot org if you can't find a physical copy. There may be others but I haven't explored what's available for the C128 nearly as deeply as the C64's library.
I was pretty understanding for 50 minutes, I wrote way too many pages of non-comprehensible "manuals" for work and hobby stuff. Knowledge transfer is a hard thing. But then I saw BALCK BOOK.
Listen, you need to get your title right.
",,,,,chameleon" -- The author's favorite song lyric
Their comma key cap was probably worn all the way through to the switch. Holy moly.
If it helps things make any sense: In music, an instrument might have multiple "registers" where the tone quality is different. A clarinet, for example, has a "register key" that must be held open to play high notes, and these have a somewhat different texture to the lower notes. I suspect this is the meaning intended when referring to the voice registers.
This made me so glad that I kept my old "bible" Commodore 64 programmer´s reference guide.... Wish i still had the old bread bin though....
18:33 I lost it there, again. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
A better title would've been the nefarious tome of bbs myths. It really does read like those brag sessions written by those who tried to impress everyone but really knew nothing.
Nice relaxing video!
I remember that the C64 systems in high school, even with the 1701 monitor, would show illegible characters under maximum contrast of black characters and white background. At home I just used an old B&W TV most of the time (and only occasionally taking the system to the living room colour set) as we couldn't afford the proper monitor if we didn't absolutely require it.
As the saying goes, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing...
This is quite a lovely memory. I do understand the purpose of the book and why it was formatted the way it was. I do agree with the editors lacking though. The intent was good.
"why did i even make this episode?"
*existential crisis intensifies*
I think the "UNUSED" locations on pages 46-47 are the unused zero-page locations, so there is actually something of use to programmers of assembly-language on the Commodore machines. That said, the Balck Book is dreadful indeed. From the anecdotes, I suspect this was a family project, so having the manuscript professionally reviewed and copyedited was likely out of the budget. I would describe the book as half-complete. An enormous effort would be needed to get the book into a proper state for publication. Barriers to entry exist for a reason!
The building Value-Soft was in is now a ...typewriter shop.
question is this book worth having, just for a collection point,
Yeah, I still think it's collectible, just don't pay much for it, and don't look to it for good advice :)
Robin, what is the highest/fastest baud rate number modems that the C-128 will support and work with? Thanks!
With the built-in serial routines, just 1200 baud in 1 Mhz mode and 2400 baud in 2 Mhz. With custom serial code routines (I think Novaterm 9.6 had this?) I've heard up to 9600 bps. With a Swiftlink or Turbo 232 cartridge (hardware UART) it can go to 38400 or higher.
The fact that BBSes are mentioned suggests that the author had a modem; hence a modem manual. That's *maybe* where some of the weird stuff in the glossary might be from - it struck me as being signal processing-y.
THREE AVAILABLE KEYBOARDS. SPAT MY COFFEE aaaaaaaLL OVER THE COMPUTER AHAHHAHAHAA
Robin could read a menu for a Chinese Takeaway id still find it fascinating
So you're trashing granny's little computer book just because it's full of errors? ;) Right on!
I for one applaud the new spelling variant of cornor though. Looks a lot edgior than the old and familior version. We should definitely considor dumping the ending "-er" altogethor, as this would make the English langwich simplor, coolor and easior to lurn, thus making it more accessible to foreignors.
The switch would benefit programmors and usors alike, and the new spelling would be much more in line with othor computor words like cursor, monitor or parsor. Additionally, "e" is a charactor that commonly produces errors on many typewritors and printors, especially if the tonor cartridge is running low on color.
Oh, God. It is okay to make yourself notes, scribbles which you understand, you can use, that are not complete, not exact, but YOU know how to use them. I have had many, and sometimes I have to throw them out because even I forgot what it meant :D But publishing as a book and advertised in a way that was in the beggining of the video? That must be much more precise than that. Many of the errors and mistakes are unforgivable. When you publish a book, you become a source of information. It was even worse in the old days when these were the main source, not the internet...
Really should've taken all the notes and written new coherent notes and put those in the book.
those anecdote passages are borderline patronizing.
"Cornor", kinda reminds me of "kernal" :-)
TBH, I see this book as a work of art.
It has a really cool backstory. the writer might not have been the best writer there is; but they actually wanted to help people other than their children.
I admire the writer and see each mistake as a reminder of the human element. It has translation errors and non-formal language which are relatable and make the book feel more personal.