Another great video, but you go make me feel old! I remember writing programs for the Sinclair Programs magazine a lot of years ago. How computing has changed.
I loved that magazine and I even typed one of the ZX81 games into a reply here the other week on another of Kari's videos. Many of those issues I still vividly remember, after revisiting them the other night. They kinda remind me of Sinclair User but aimed more at young kids starting out, as I was in the early 80s. My first experience was with the NASCOM if you remember that home soldered computer kit. Things got a whole lot easier once the ZX Spectrum hit the scene.
It is always interesting to see the younger generation consider the tech from the 80's worth exploring. She did a great job in the video and I certainly think that deserves kudos. If you make more, I'll watch. And of course I will continue to tune in to @ExplainingComputers as always.
I started with the Vic 20 in the 80s, it had 3.5K of RAM, it didn't stop people making excellent games for it, including chess, that was also hard to beat. I'm now a C++ software engineer, I have made a career out of programming 👍
Kari, I'm a 54 year old software/hardware engineer that grew up in the 80s with those exact magazines and computers. You might not realize it, but you doing this will put you light years ahead of most people in the computer industry because you're literally looking at where computers have come from. If you have that background, you'll much MUCH better decisions as a designer. You're on the right track - keep up the GREAT work! You're going places! If you haven't already, check into the Big Five games for the TRS-80, like Robot Attack, Meteor Mission II, Defense Command, etc....
Agreed. 55. Taught myself 6502 and wrote games without an assembler! (VIC/64) It changes the way you think. It also goes hand in hand with digital electronics.
I did this when I was in middle school. But it was already deprecated. Bought a Tandy color comp from amity and my library had ass old books in it for the comp lol
I have a few years on you - I was doing my computer science degree at about this time. We learned how things worked, not just how to be a OOD/C++ software engineer, like today. I feel privileged to have had the education I had.
Yep! Like the artwork on Atari 2600 box versus what the actual game looked like. Luckily, Activision moved away from this practice and actually showed the game graphics on the back (as well as the name of the programmer which was the reason the founders of Activision left Atari in the first place: no recognition for their hard work).
@@JohnnyWednesdaySo true! It's all relative. I remember being blown away by Pitfall's graphics. So simple in comparison to graphics of today, but at the time it was amazing. Later, I realized the ACTUAL impressive thing about that game is how David Crane was able to squeeze over 200 unique screens into only 4K of ROM space. The way he did it is quite genius. Here he is talking about this very clever trick: ua-cam.com/video/MBT1OK6VAIU/v-deo.htmlsi=aGV5h8O2Rpf_0Pdp&t=1332 (The whole lecture is quite interesting though).
I followed, the same path. Now 52. Although I had seen and used a few machines at fairs and school. The Zx81 was my neighbors. His parents, worked for the local Hardware store, which he now runs. I used to work there after school from 10 to 15. I came back and worked from them when I was 34. As the computer support person. (I also ended up being press ganged into analyzing, their internal systems). Self-taught and my peers were some of the best in the field back then in my country. I from there ran my own company, providing technical and development support. :) Always love to here the path traveled and hopes and ambitions for the future. I am off too teach ICT again at a Mental Health organisation, if all goes as planned in the next two weeks.
Same here... will be 56 this year and recall the listings from all the magazines and books in those days. I've been a software engineer, teacher, researcher and it all stems from that magic 1981-85 period.
The worst were the ones that made you type in huge arrays of hex digits so it could run parts of the program in machine code. If you made a mistake and typed an 'F8' instead of an 'FB' the program was likely to crash and you would lose everything unless you had remembered to save to tape.
I remember doing one which was 4 pages long and got an error at the end.. the following month in the magazine they apologized as they printed a mistake so got it working in the end 😂
51 year old dane here. Those was the good times. 2 whole tv channels on a black & white tv. Rotary phone rang once a week. The inner city bus only showed every 40 mins. People knew how to use typewriters. Then one day my dad brought home a ZX81. I remember thinking this was truly groundbreaking because up untill this point anything on a screen had been completely locked. Today we take it for granted, but back then, being able to type in something as simple as your own name & make it go "beep" made me think this would change the future. A couple of month later dad brought home a similar brand basic type-in games magazine. Spend 4 hours typeing it in, especially as you usually need to "convert" the basic code to be compatible with your type of machine. Didnt have a cassette recorder. So sunday afternoon a week later i typed it all in again, just to play some more. It was different times back then. Today people have a hissy fit if the bus is 2 mins late.
"Then one day my dad brought home a ZX81. I remember thinking this was truly groundbreaking because up untill this point anything on a screen had been completely locked." Exactly the same happened to me. Same experience.
My first programming languages were FORTRAN and COMPASS for a CDC 3200. Google "CDC 3200 Monash" for the sort of thing. Ours was up about the 12th floor of the tallest building in Perth..
@@0L1 "Pseudo-Nostalgia" perhaps? Sounds like a good 8-bit game title/plot though as it sounds silly enough to be one like "Rockstar ate my hamster", "Ninja Scooter Simulator", "How to be a complete bastard". :D
My dad took me to an industry fair in germany when I was very young. Had my first encounter with a computer there. Had no idea what a computer was back then, those were brand new. There was a screen and a keyboard, and I said "look dad, you can type on a TV". I went there and entered my name, then pressed return. Some kind of interpreter must have interpreted it as a variable or command name, and it gave an error message "?bad name". I was shocked. One or two years later, our school got its first computer (a Commodore PET), where I started to learn programming in Basic, and later 6502 assembly.
I’m a software engineer and same. Though I got my hands on them about 10 years after their prime it was still my introduction to programming. Its a shame we’ve moved so far away from educating people on how to program/use computers
How did you become a game engine developer? I'm currently applying to college, and I'm interested in game engines (among other things) but not game dev itself. I would like to know if you can get such a job from a pure cs background.
@@spyrgelispyyDifferent game engine developer here, but to answer your question - I have a computer engineering degree. CS is also fine, but a bit more knowledge about hardware helps. I always put more focus on personal projects & research vs degrees when interviewing people. (I also grew up in the 80s and spent many hours with my dad's help entering in code for games on my C64 from Byte magazine.)
I'm a 43 year old guy now, but this really takes me back. When I was 4 years old, my dad bought our family a Sinclair Spectrum (+2, 128k ram). Back then, games magazines had code in them just like this, and I remember the speccy manual itself had a BASIC hangman game you could type out. As a young kid I used to love typing out the code and seeing the games running. I'm a software engineer now, so it must have made quite the impact. It's awesome to see a young lady like you playing about with retro stuff like this. I wish my daughter would get as excited over this stuff as you do!
I'm 43 too and my dad did the same I was about 4 too but he didn't like the keyboard to the point that after seeing my cousins c64 he saved up to get one of those instead
Stuff you guys with your 128k, my first Speccy was when I was nine and it was a 16k. Best day of my childhood was when my mum surprised me with a ram pack so I could play 48k games!
My first speccy was the 48+ but the keyboard was not as good as the original and then I got a 128+2 with the awful built in cassette deck which failed so many times, why didn't Amstrad fit a external mic in/out attachment, would have saved them alot of money on repairs.
I absolutely love the ending of your input, "I'm a software engineer now, so it must have made quite the impact" and that is EXACTLY what every one of those companies and medias were going for, to inspire you to take it further! (Okay, we can definitely argue about "every one" of those companies lmao)
In the 80s, those computer listings will have been typeset manually by someone who probably had no knowledge of Basic, so they had many typos. But debugging was a great way to learn. I started with a ZX81, with the wobbly 16kB RAM pack.
52 years old here. I had a Dragon32 (later also a Speccy 48k), and my friend had a ZX81 (later also a Speccy 48k). We would spend hours and hours typing these games in from magazines. Half the time there was a typo in the magazine (because the code in the magazine was usually typed in by a secretary who knew nothing about programming) and the game wouldn't run, until we worked out where they messed up. As 12 year olds we felt like programming GODS when we managed to work out and fix the program so that it actually worked. It's been a long time since I saw that horrific rubbery keyboard on the Spectrum. The Dragon32 had a real keyboard, which was far less stressfull, but it didn't "autocorrect" like the Speccy. Thank you for make me feel old Kari ! ;)
This video gets you a subscribe. I remember typing pages of basic into my Speccy, way back in 1982, only for it to whinge about an error near the beginning. Those Usborne books were great too, though the ones about ghosts, monsters and UFO's were always the most popular and formative on young minds, and they've been reprinted relatively recently, too.
Not sure why you appeared on my feed, but I'm glad you did - I like how relaxed and natural your presentation is. Loved a bit of basic coding back in the day on our Amstrad CPC464 (I think that's what it was called)
Oh man, "input", "Compute!" and "Compute Gazette", "Info 64" (later just "info") and so many more. Type in games, reviews of games, upcoming software and hardware. Good times!
Oh, man. There was a helicopter game in one of those magazines I'm still trying to find. You'd fly around in a chopper and shoot blocks to make your way out, a la "Breakout." To this day, I can't remember the name of the game or the magazine. Thanks for the reminder about "Input."
It's great to see someone of your generation making videos about these things! I do hope you'll do many more, perhaps on a variety of different computers of that era (assuming you have access).
With no internet and needing to save a few weeks of pocket money to get any games, listings in books like this (and computer magazines of the time too) were great for getting new content back in the 1980s. In fact, it was from typing listing like this in, and changing stuff around to see what happened, that I learned how to code. Thanks for bringing back some great memories!
Very nostalgic. Love the artwork in these. Bought some of these from our school’s book sales & typed them into our old Apple II back in the mid to late 80s.
I wasnt so quick at typing back in the day, I remember sitting down once a month with my mum (Who was a data inputter back in the day) with my copy of Computer Battlegames, and she would type out one game of my choice for me. I learnt a lot from the code, and started to self learn Basic.
These books were great! I had the text adventures book as a kid. I had a TI 99/4A, which wasn't one of the computers included in their code listings, so I really had to learn what the code was doing and then find out how the same was done on the TI; I couldn't just bang it out as written. It was annoying at the time, but probably helped me be a better abstract thinker, and ultimately, developer.
This is amazing to me! I'm 53, and I can genuinely say that me getting my Speccy when I was 11 defined the rest of my career. I used to know the keypresses by heart. So nice to see you using a real Spectrum.
We had some of these books in my school library back in the 90s. One of my great triumphs as a 12-year-old was getting Death Valley to run on GW-BASIC for old DOS computers. They were really great books since resources for kids who were interested in that sort of thing had really dried up after the 80s microcomputer boom.
I did the graphics for most of the eight-bit versions of The Never Ending Story except the C64. Great video. As a pixel pusher, coding is dark magic to me.
Nice to see someone taking an interest in retro computing and also trying to get others interested but doing it in such a fun and intuitive way. Great stuff! Keep it going Kari.
I'm a 54 year (feeling very) old analyst that started off on a ZX81, then ZX Spectrum. I'm now repairing and restoring these amazing vintage machines as well as playing some classic ZX81 Games (The Valley of Adventure) and Spectrum games (the likes of Atic Atac, 3D Ant Attack, The Hobbit) On the original hardware using the original tape recorders of the era that I've also restored. It's absolutely fantastic to see the younger generation programming on these machines. Thank you for creating this content and sharing.
in my 50's here. I remember getting that exact same book and spending hours typing them in and playing them on my speccie back in the day. (And then later started tweaking the code). My 10yr old self learnt so much. Massive nostalgia trip
I had a few of these in the US from my local library. There's just something about british cartoon art that just felt slightly different from cartoon art in the US, whether it be robots or ghosts explaining a for-loop. Of course, I wanted graphics, but it was 20 years later when I figured out why the graphics commands in those Speccy/BBC books never matched the graphics commands in the Apple II manuals. Regarding the keyboard - I THINK full time pro-developers had hacked in proper keyboards with mechanical switches, because ... line editor with a membrane keyboard ... 6:16 - Ah - forgot the Usborne has PDF downloadable copies of their books. I WISH I had mentorship with machine code as a kid. Teenagers bored out of their skulls and willing to spend hours and hours hacking in assembly are what hatched the british games industry
I still have one of these Usborne books, and a few other Spectrum ones, bought in the 80s and they have moved around with me. Good for a nostalgia trip still!
That's so cool. I had a C64 as a child and we had a magazine called 64'er. There were pages of programs to type out. And it was terrible if you made a mistake somewhere.
This brings back memories of spending hours typing out lines of Commodore BASIC on my C64 from computer magazines and then spending even more time trying to figure out where I'd made the error when the game wouldn't run 🤣
Same here! And quite often the error wasn't made while typing, but was caused by an actually error as printed in the magazine. Of course you wouldn't know that until you'd spent literally hours meticulously going through everything. Then once your realized there was a typo in the mag, you'd have to wait a month for the next issue to come out, keeping fingers crossed that they'd figured it out and print a correction (and that the mag hadn't sold out or gone out of business). Quite a few games were never fixed, so the time was simply wasted. One such game I remember with particular dread was called "Grab des Pharaohs" (Tomb of the pharaoh) from the German magazine C64er (at least that's how I remember the name) - this game was in many, many, MANY parts, taking up tens of pages each issue, and the end result was supposed to be a game where you entered a pyramid on an exciting adventure... In reality, the listings were full of typos, so each month came with a few corrections, but in the end, it still didn't work properly and was never fixed! Oh, the days!
wow.. that brings back memories. The excitement, the utter excitement of buying the book from the Book Club in school.. waiting weeks or months to finally get the book.. the anticipation after seeing the pictures! And the inevitable, *inevitable* incredible let down after seeing the final results on the screen! But we were back in the pioneering days, this was all new, always different, always exciting to see what comes next... do you know what its like to see photo-realistic imagery flying around the screen now in a game?! I still cant believe it.. decades have passed but in a flash. Games these days, indeed what can be done on a computer now, is simply incredible to me.
When I was 12y old (1995) I bought a special edition of some gaming magazine that discussed programming games for x86 architecture (486DX2 instruction set) in TASM (Turbo ASM) and little did I realize back then this was NOT the easiest entry point into game programming (what a shocking revelation!). Funnily enough I'm back to square one as I again code in assembly (though "tad bit" more powerful MVS mainframe architecture). Those were days. Today my two kids learn visual coding by effortlessly moving blocks of code with layers upon layers of frameworks, and I'm just amazed how simple and accessible programming has become.
Great Vid Kari! I recently discovered Usborne books after watching a vid by Matt Godbolt describing the fundamentals of machine code. It seems they nailed it way back then so still relevant today which is a big achievement.
Wow! *New Sub* I turned 59 this year and I've been in a retro mood as of late. I was looking into retro coding and so forth. This is right up my alley. The first computer I ever worked on was a TRS-80. My first computer I bought was a Vic-20 followed by a Commodore 64. I just bought a Commodore 64 mini this month. I am putting together my own "school" curriculum and these look so much fun. Thanks for the video!
Back in my day for the C64 in the back of the mag there used to be a tonne of hex values that one would type in with error checking. It was so exciting to type it up and play it! Thanks for the interesting video! Keep up the good work!
Same on the Spectrum.. machine code programs printed out as Hex values, and you would type the whole lot into a Basic program called a Hex loader, then save it to tape.. and hopefully it worked !
My mom, recognizing a bargain, used to help me do the same. She would narrate the hex while I typed. Only person who I know whose mom would read him hexadecimal. 😂
@@markasiala6355 Haha! That's awesome. I was only allowed 45 minutes a day with my computer, after which I had to unplug it from the TV and put it in my room. I would wait until they think I am sleeping and then I would type the hex codes blind into the editor, using the movement of the tape drive to confirm entries xD
Great video. If it wasn't for the Usborne books and my local library, I wouldn't have the career in software development I have today. I used to love those books, we always knew the end result wouldn't be as exciting as the art made it out to be, but it got us interested enough to keep us focussed enough to enter the listings and then alter them and understand what was happening. I'd like to see more of these if you're up for making more videos like this. Thank you for the memories :)
I was born in 83 and my first computer was the James Bond version of spectrum zx2 so thins brought back memories . Can’t believe I’ve never found this channel before . Your videos are really brilliant
My brother and I used to spend weeks typing in code from magazines. More often, the published codes had spelling mistakes. Only ONE spelling mistake meant the program won't run. Commodore 64, it was 1984-1988.
BASIC is what got me into programming and culminated in a -admittedly brief- career as a software engineer. It's a shame the language wasn't more standardised even though BASICode tried to remedy that somewhat successfully.
I have one of the Usborne books from back in the day, and I used other, similar books from the local public library to learn programming as a kid. They were already old, then (in the early 90's), but they were fun to work through. :-) Some of the computers they'd mention were unknown to me outside of these books, and only since the advent of UA-cam have I finally seen some of them in action, including the ZX Spectrum (and earlier Sinclair machines), which were sold under the Timex brand here in the US but with only limited sales success. Nobody I knew owned anything other than an Apple II series 8-bit computer or IBM PC clone at the time. Other computers were just things I had seen in stores or mentioned in passing in computer books, despite the success many of them apparently had had just a few years earlier, when I was too young to notice such things.
I had several of these books. I actually typed in every program in one book and saved them on tape. I even created a very very basic menu to choose the games
I remember as a teenager, when these kinds of computers were popular, they had some of them running at the stores to try them out with the BASIC interpreter open. I used to quickly write a little number guessing game like in this video into every such computer I encountered. At home I had a Commodore 16 back then where I learned to program in BASIC.
I used to program out of these books on my infant school's BBC Micro in the '80s, I remember doing a horse betting game, and a top down racing game where you avoided the sides of a canyon and stars representing obstacles.
Kari! You took me back to my youth. This is how I learned to code on my TI-99. I couldn't afford a floppy drive, so my mom rigged up a cassette player.
haha this takes me back, my first Computer as a 8 year old, the ZX81 (the prequal to the ZX Spectrum), upgraded from 1k memory with a 16k ram pack, try programming on that touch (not very) sensitive keyboard.
I have clear containers with blue handles like the ones in the background but mine are bigger and the corners have structural reinforcement so you can stack a lot of them. Perfect way to store stuff.
Thx. Got a real kick out of this. I too back in the day spent a lot of time entering code from mags into my machine and learning basic. Yes, please do another game.
This is GREAT and UA-cam knows what I love. I am so pleased to see someone of your age into this, I come from this era (loving the t-shirt too) and it brings back wonderful (and sometimes frustrated) memories of a wonderful pastime (plus you're a fellow Brit ha ha). Thank you I will be watching more of your vids, keep up the wonderful work.
Hi Kari, it was lovely to see the ZX Spectrum again, I spent ages 12-14 playing Skool Daze, Hungry Horace,Ghost Rider and so many fun games on it. We used to break into the programs and just change the credits and try pass them off as our own games to girls.🙊😂😂 But I went on to become a CNC programmer for Lathes and Milling Machines in Engineering and lived a very luxurious life for a lot of years. I can easily see how you find electronics and programming exciting.Thanks for sharing! ❤️+✌️
so there are only 2 vidoes up yet on this channel and youtube already know i would love this :D soooonice seeing those old corde book tutorials. back in the days when i was way too little to understand what they were about i felt like im gonna keep them store them for later when i become a space man working on a starship like in startrek and i would be the special know everything guy because i have saved those books :D like how to defend against aliens for example .. it after all said so right in those books .."defend yourself against alien attackers ... " and i felt like yeah some day im gonna be able to do that :D
What incredible content, whatever is going on with your mic also has this ASMR effect, the whole flipping through the book was amazing. All the best gadgets, I could watch this all day.
My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. But funny thing: I never really was into games. I was more into utilities and useful applications. Wrote a database program on a C64 once. I was so deep into computers that I didn't even get a girlfriend until I was 26. Here I am nowadays, regressing (computer-wise) and investing in old stuff, remembering what I made back then, and kinda shunning modern crap anymore. Seems like I'm having more fun with that older stuff, than anything they come out with nowadays. And I'm 54, btw...
I have this amazing memory when I was 5 years old of my Nan looking after me one day, my Dad had got a commordore 64 sometime before this, my Nan brought round a programming magazine she had got from a bootfair just like the ones in this video. We had an amazing day programming in all sorts of games and saving them to the cassette. After watching this video it hit me right in the heart when I was about to ring her and see if she remembers which magazine it was but sadly she passed two years ago. Miss her everyday x
Hi Kari! I am 65 years old and I used to fill my evenings (and nights) typing in these codes from the magazines I bought. Great fun seeing someone your age doing this in 2024! Keep up the good work! Great fun!
AHHH! So many memories - having a ZX Spectrum in the 1980s, spending a lot of time programming in basic (although never got really advanced), typing in programs from books and magazines and they finding they don't work... It was such a great time and this video does make me feel very nostalgic. After a while third-party producers brought out "proper" keyboards for the Spectrum, so although you still pressed one key to get the command, the keys themselves were plastic, the case was bigger and it was more like a full size keyboard. The keyboard was attached to the main chipboard by a couple of flat ribbon-style cables, so it was easy to swap for a different one. It made for much easier programming.
When Speccy magazines went from publishing code that had to be copied out for hours to including tapes with a load of old games on them was bigger for me than the shift from hard drvies to SSDs. Great video!
Love this enthusiasm. With the same enthusiasm I got started on a TI 99/4A in 1983. The only difference being that I actually wrote my own games, all in BASIC. For us, the first generation of computer kids, the home computer was the gate to a world of wonders and imagination. With all that came later, this is hard to imagine nowadays.
Back in the 80s I regularly bought the magazines to put the games listings in, spending hours and hours doing it. I’ve still got some of the old magazines, Your Computer and Computer and Video Games. The listings with embedded machine code were especially fun to do, endless lines of hex numbers put in manually - get one number wrong and it’s all over. What fun! There is a short video of a game called Vic Logger for the Vic-20 on UA-cam. I remember everybody in the house playing it. Now it looks so basic but at the time it was completely riveting. I even got a couple of games published in magazines myself, basically knock offs of the old game and watch games. Keep up the good work!
A fantastic video Kari, I am in my early 50s now and grew up with the ZX Spectrum as it was my first home computer, I still own the Usborne book collection and enjoyed programming from them when I was a kid. It is great to see young people such as yourself taking an interest in these historic computers and programming in BASIC. The other book Usborne Computer Battlegames was very good also. It would be interesting to you program the games in each book as those ones contain animated graphics to create simple games. Great content.
I learned coding on the speccy! Its not long before you can just type away even with the key combinations. When my kids were growing up, we did quite a lot of coding starting with the speccy and those very same books. Many Schools in the 1980s used the spectrum as a class computer and did projects all around the curriculum using them. It was a real blast from the past watching you code and run one.
I grew up loaning these books from the library and learning to program at home, and many *many* years later, I'm still writing code professionally as a software developer. I love how you found same joy as I did in the goofy illustrations and story they tried to weave around these simple programs. Honestly it brings a huge smile to my face seeing a new generation discover these books. Thank you!
I remember in 1983 learning simple coding on a Mac in a highschool class. We were given instructions on how to make colored lines or moving dots, and after understanding what the code could do I mapped out a smiling face with moving eyes and mouth. That was my first introduction to coding. When you understand the power of coding you can do amazing things.
Thank you. This brought back memories. I use to play games on a Radio Shack TR80 back in high school. Thanks for the links to the books. Looking forward to reading through them.
Wow! What a nostalgia hit! My dad brought back a 128K ZX Spectrum from the UK when I was 5 or 6 and I DEFINITELY remember that book. My attempts to program a game failed miserably, but that console sparked a lifetime love of computers. Thank you!
I've not seen this mentioned in the comments, so I'll add this: by using one key to input a complete command, the Spectrum BASIC interpreter saved memory space that other versions of BASIC (usually made by Microsoft) needed to convert a fully typed command into the single byte token stored in RAM by the interpreter. It eliminated the need for a tokenizer and the data table holding the names of the commands. Please continue your wonderful videos!
What a nice video, thank you! I remember typing in programs from computer books back then but I don't think I ever saw any of these Usborne books until I heard about them in recent years. They're quite nice with all the artwork, etc.
First time seeing your videos. You are an excellent presenter. Very natural and enjoyable to watch. I wish I would have known these type in games existed back in the day:)
I remember being able to "check out" a Timex Sinclair 1000 from our library as a kid. With its awful membrane keyboard it would take ages to enter a program. I'm enjoying watching you port BASIC games into python. I wonder if you might explore the reverse -- porting more modern (simple) games to BASIC!
Another great video, but you go make me feel old! I remember writing programs for the Sinclair Programs magazine a lot of years ago. How computing has changed.
Hate to break it to you... You are not the youngest anymore, haha. But still young in mind!
I loved that magazine and I even typed one of the ZX81 games into a reply here the other week on another of Kari's videos. Many of those issues I still vividly remember, after revisiting them the other night. They kinda remind me of Sinclair User but aimed more at young kids starting out, as I was in the early 80s. My first experience was with the NASCOM if you remember that home soldered computer kit. Things got a whole lot easier once the ZX Spectrum hit the scene.
It is always interesting to see the younger generation consider the tech from the 80's worth exploring. She did a great job in the video and I certainly think that deserves kudos. If you make more, I'll watch. And of course I will continue to tune in to @ExplainingComputers as always.
*do
I started with the Vic 20 in the 80s, it had 3.5K of RAM, it didn't stop people making excellent games for it, including chess, that was also hard to beat. I'm now a C++ software engineer, I have made a career out of programming 👍
Kari, I'm a 54 year old software/hardware engineer that grew up in the 80s with those exact magazines and computers. You might not realize it, but you doing this will put you light years ahead of most people in the computer industry because you're literally looking at where computers have come from. If you have that background, you'll much MUCH better decisions as a designer. You're on the right track - keep up the GREAT work! You're going places!
If you haven't already, check into the Big Five games for the TRS-80, like Robot Attack, Meteor Mission II, Defense Command, etc....
50, and I’m about to play this to my seven year old: “This is how dad did computers a few…errr…a while back!” Absolutely top content.
I agree even I play Commodore league back then.
Agreed. 55. Taught myself 6502 and wrote games without an assembler! (VIC/64)
It changes the way you think. It also goes hand in hand with digital electronics.
I did this when I was in middle school. But it was already deprecated. Bought a Tandy color comp from amity and my library had ass old books in it for the comp lol
I have a few years on you - I was doing my computer science degree at about this time. We learned how things worked, not just how to be a OOD/C++ software engineer, like today. I feel privileged to have had the education I had.
Loved those books. The hilarious contrast between the art and the actual games was amazing.
Same tactics used on Atari 2600 boxes 😁
Nothing hilarious about it - we didn't see bad graphics back then, we saw an aid to our imagination
Yep! Like the artwork on Atari 2600 box versus what the actual game looked like. Luckily, Activision moved away from this practice and actually showed the game graphics on the back (as well as the name of the programmer which was the reason the founders of Activision left Atari in the first place: no recognition for their hard work).
@@JustWasted3HoursHere Yeah! I remember when I seen the box for Keystone Kapers... I knew I wanted the game based on the box alone 🙂
@@JohnnyWednesdaySo true! It's all relative. I remember being blown away by Pitfall's graphics. So simple in comparison to graphics of today, but at the time it was amazing. Later, I realized the ACTUAL impressive thing about that game is how David Crane was able to squeeze over 200 unique screens into only 4K of ROM space. The way he did it is quite genius. Here he is talking about this very clever trick: ua-cam.com/video/MBT1OK6VAIU/v-deo.htmlsi=aGV5h8O2Rpf_0Pdp&t=1332 (The whole lecture is quite interesting though).
I had a ZX81, VIC-20 then C64. I'm 55 now and still have most these books and others. They were great times. 😊
I had the acorn electron, c64 then Amiga. Those were the days.
I followed, the same path. Now 52. Although I had seen and used a few machines at fairs and school. The Zx81 was my neighbors. His parents, worked for the local Hardware store, which he now runs. I used to work there after school from 10 to 15. I came back and worked from them when I was 34. As the computer support person. (I also ended up being press ganged into analyzing, their internal systems). Self-taught and my peers were some of the best in the field back then in my country. I from there ran my own company, providing technical and development support. :) Always love to here the path traveled and hopes and ambitions for the future. I am off too teach ICT again at a Mental Health organisation, if all goes as planned in the next two weeks.
Same here... will be 56 this year and recall the listings from all the magazines and books in those days. I've been a software engineer, teacher, researcher and it all stems from that magic 1981-85 period.
go
why you all cry the same age here ?
@@lucasrem Your comment makes no sense, you should delete it.
The hours I spent copying code from a book, trying to debug it, then the excitement when it actually worked.
then later hacking it
The worst were the ones that made you type in huge arrays of hex digits so it could run parts of the program in machine code. If you made a mistake and typed an 'F8' instead of an 'FB' the program was likely to crash and you would lose everything unless you had remembered to save to tape.
Did it for fun as a kid and now I get paid to do it.
I remember getting the error message "TYPE MISMATCH AT LINE 80", so I typed "MISMATCH" into line 80 and it still didn't work! Reader, I rage quit.
I remember doing one which was 4 pages long and got an error at the end.. the following month in the magazine they apologized as they printed a mistake so got it working in the end 😂
51 year old dane here. Those was the good times. 2 whole tv channels on a black & white tv. Rotary phone rang once a week. The inner city bus only showed every 40 mins. People knew how to use typewriters. Then one day my dad brought home a ZX81. I remember thinking this was truly groundbreaking because up untill this point anything on a screen had been completely locked. Today we take it for granted, but back then, being able to type in something as simple as your own name & make it go "beep" made me think this would change the future. A couple of month later dad brought home a similar brand basic type-in games magazine. Spend 4 hours typeing it in, especially as you usually need to "convert" the basic code to be compatible with your type of machine. Didnt have a cassette recorder. So sunday afternoon a week later i typed it all in again, just to play some more. It was different times back then. Today people have a hissy fit if the bus is 2 mins late.
What's the word for feeling nostalgia for times you haven't lived? This is how I feel from reading your comment.
"Then one day my dad brought home a ZX81. I remember thinking this was truly groundbreaking because up untill this point anything on a screen had been completely locked."
Exactly the same happened to me. Same experience.
My first programming languages were FORTRAN and COMPASS for a CDC 3200. Google "CDC 3200 Monash" for the sort of thing. Ours was up about the 12th floor of the tallest building in Perth..
@@0L1 "Pseudo-Nostalgia" perhaps? Sounds like a good 8-bit game title/plot though as it sounds silly enough to be one like "Rockstar ate my hamster", "Ninja Scooter Simulator", "How to be a complete bastard". :D
My dad took me to an industry fair in germany when I was very young. Had my first encounter with a computer there. Had no idea what a computer was back then, those were brand new. There was a screen and a keyboard, and I said "look dad, you can type on a TV". I went there and entered my name, then pressed return. Some kind of interpreter must have interpreted it as a variable or command name, and it gave an error message "?bad name". I was shocked.
One or two years later, our school got its first computer (a Commodore PET), where I started to learn programming in Basic, and later 6502 assembly.
I'm a game engine developer and I started as a kid in the 80s with these systems - always a pleasure to see them again
I’m a software engineer and same. Though I got my hands on them about 10 years after their prime it was still my introduction to programming. Its a shame we’ve moved so far away from educating people on how to program/use computers
Which engine(s) are you/ have you worked on? If I may ask.
How did you become a game engine developer? I'm currently applying to college, and I'm interested in game engines (among other things) but not game dev itself. I would like to know if you can get such a job from a pure cs background.
@@spyrgelispyyDifferent game engine developer here, but to answer your question - I have a computer engineering degree. CS is also fine, but a bit more knowledge about hardware helps. I always put more focus on personal projects & research vs degrees when interviewing people.
(I also grew up in the 80s and spent many hours with my dad's help entering in code for games on my C64 from Byte magazine.)
Because we all remember how eye opening it felt when discovering for the first time "IF/THEN" in BASIC.
I'm a 43 year old guy now, but this really takes me back. When I was 4 years old, my dad bought our family a Sinclair Spectrum (+2, 128k ram). Back then, games magazines had code in them just like this, and I remember the speccy manual itself had a BASIC hangman game you could type out.
As a young kid I used to love typing out the code and seeing the games running.
I'm a software engineer now, so it must have made quite the impact.
It's awesome to see a young lady like you playing about with retro stuff like this. I wish my daughter would get as excited over this stuff as you do!
I'm 43 too and my dad did the same I was about 4 too but he didn't like the keyboard to the point that after seeing my cousins c64 he saved up to get one of those instead
47 here and the ZX 128k was my first computer. Freddie Hardest was amazing!
Stuff you guys with your 128k, my first Speccy was when I was nine and it was a 16k. Best day of my childhood was when my mum surprised me with a ram pack so I could play 48k games!
My first speccy was the 48+ but the keyboard was not as good as the original and then I got a 128+2 with the awful built in cassette deck which failed so many times, why didn't Amstrad fit a external mic in/out attachment, would have saved them alot of money on repairs.
I absolutely love the ending of your input, "I'm a software engineer now, so it must have made quite the impact" and that is EXACTLY what every one of those companies and medias were going for, to inspire you to take it further! (Okay, we can definitely argue about "every one" of those companies lmao)
In the 80s, those computer listings will have been typeset manually by someone who probably had no knowledge of Basic, so they had many typos. But debugging was a great way to learn. I started with a ZX81, with the wobbly 16kB RAM pack.
Kari I'm 43 and I actually had this book when I was a kid. Thanks for the blast of nostalgia and making old things new again with your videos.
why you all cry the same age here ?
52 years old here. I had a Dragon32 (later also a Speccy 48k), and my friend had a ZX81 (later also a Speccy 48k). We would spend hours and hours typing these games in from magazines. Half the time there was a typo in the magazine (because the code in the magazine was usually typed in by a secretary who knew nothing about programming) and the game wouldn't run, until we worked out where they messed up. As 12 year olds we felt like programming GODS when we managed to work out and fix the program so that it actually worked.
It's been a long time since I saw that horrific rubbery keyboard on the Spectrum. The Dragon32 had a real keyboard, which was far less stressfull, but it didn't "autocorrect" like the Speccy.
Thank you for make me feel old Kari ! ;)
This video gets you a subscribe. I remember typing pages of basic into my Speccy, way back in 1982, only for it to whinge about an error near the beginning. Those Usborne books were great too, though the ones about ghosts, monsters and UFO's were always the most popular and formative on young minds, and they've been reprinted relatively recently, too.
First time watcher. Not sure where your videos have been all my life but Im very glad to have stumbled on this corner of the Internet.
Not sure why you appeared on my feed, but I'm glad you did - I like how relaxed and natural your presentation is.
Loved a bit of basic coding back in the day on our Amstrad CPC464 (I think that's what it was called)
I love these videos! Thankyou!!!
I learnt coding in the 80’s from the amazing ‘input’ magazine.
I have the complete collection of those in folders. Bought from a car boot sale many years ago.
Oh man, "input", "Compute!" and "Compute Gazette", "Info 64" (later just "info") and so many more. Type in games, reviews of games, upcoming software and hardware. Good times!
Oh, man. There was a helicopter game in one of those magazines I'm still trying to find. You'd fly around in a chopper and shoot blocks to make your way out, a la "Breakout." To this day, I can't remember the name of the game or the magazine. Thanks for the reminder about "Input."
Got mine. Still remember an article predicting the Internet and accessing the computer to find the bus schedule or buy movie tickets...
It's great to see someone of your generation making videos about these things! I do hope you'll do many more, perhaps on a variety of different computers of that era (assuming you have access).
With no internet and needing to save a few weeks of pocket money to get any games, listings in books like this (and computer magazines of the time too) were great for getting new content back in the 1980s. In fact, it was from typing listing like this in, and changing stuff around to see what happened, that I learned how to code. Thanks for bringing back some great memories!
Very nostalgic. Love the artwork in these. Bought some of these from our school’s book sales & typed them into our old Apple II back in the mid to late 80s.
Usborne books from this era were very special :)
I wasnt so quick at typing back in the day, I remember sitting down once a month with my mum (Who was a data inputter back in the day) with my copy of Computer Battlegames, and she would type out one game of my choice for me. I learnt a lot from the code, and started to self learn Basic.
Started with a Vic 20.
I'm old enough to have typed some of these programs into a Vic 20, back in the day. Really glad to see they aren't forgotten. Great video, thank you!
These books were great! I had the text adventures book as a kid. I had a TI 99/4A, which wasn't one of the computers included in their code listings, so I really had to learn what the code was doing and then find out how the same was done on the TI; I couldn't just bang it out as written. It was annoying at the time, but probably helped me be a better abstract thinker, and ultimately, developer.
I had that book. I copied out the Haunted House program at age 13. I then used that engine to make a few other games.
This is amazing to me! I'm 53, and I can genuinely say that me getting my Speccy when I was 11 defined the rest of my career. I used to know the keypresses by heart. So nice to see you using a real Spectrum.
We had some of these books in my school library back in the 90s. One of my great triumphs as a 12-year-old was getting Death Valley to run on GW-BASIC for old DOS computers. They were really great books since resources for kids who were interested in that sort of thing had really dried up after the 80s microcomputer boom.
I did the graphics for most of the eight-bit versions of The Never Ending Story except the C64. Great video. As a pixel pusher, coding is dark magic to me.
Coding is dark magic to us code monkeys too, especially in assembly language
Nice to see someone taking an interest in retro computing and also trying
to get others interested but doing it in such a fun and intuitive way. Great stuff!
Keep it going Kari.
I'm a 54 year (feeling very) old analyst that started off on a ZX81, then ZX Spectrum. I'm now repairing and restoring these amazing vintage machines as well as playing some classic ZX81 Games (The Valley of Adventure) and Spectrum games (the likes of Atic Atac, 3D Ant Attack, The Hobbit) On the original hardware using the original tape recorders of the era that I've also restored. It's absolutely fantastic to see the younger generation programming on these machines. Thank you for creating this content and sharing.
in my 50's here. I remember getting that exact same book and spending hours typing them in and playing them on my speccie back in the day. (And then later started tweaking the code).
My 10yr old self learnt so much. Massive nostalgia trip
Can't believe this is only your second ever video - good stuff! Big fan of these Usborne books, they were a big part of my computer education 😁
I had a few of these in the US from my local library. There's just something about british cartoon art that just felt slightly different from cartoon art in the US, whether it be robots or ghosts explaining a for-loop.
Of course, I wanted graphics, but it was 20 years later when I figured out why the graphics commands in those Speccy/BBC books never matched the graphics commands in the Apple II manuals.
Regarding the keyboard - I THINK full time pro-developers had hacked in proper keyboards with mechanical switches, because ... line editor with a membrane keyboard ...
6:16 - Ah - forgot the Usborne has PDF downloadable copies of their books.
I WISH I had mentorship with machine code as a kid. Teenagers bored out of their skulls and willing to spend hours and hours hacking in assembly are what hatched the british games industry
I still have one of these Usborne books, and a few other Spectrum ones, bought in the 80s and they have moved around with me. Good for a nostalgia trip still!
That's so cool. I had a C64 as a child and we had a magazine called 64'er. There were pages of programs to type out. And it was terrible if you made a mistake somewhere.
This brings back memories of spending hours typing out lines of Commodore BASIC on my C64 from computer magazines and then spending even more time trying to figure out where I'd made the error when the game wouldn't run 🤣
Same here! And quite often the error wasn't made while typing, but was caused by an actually error as printed in the magazine. Of course you wouldn't know that until you'd spent literally hours meticulously going through everything.
Then once your realized there was a typo in the mag, you'd have to wait a month for the next issue to come out, keeping fingers crossed that they'd figured it out and print a correction (and that the mag hadn't sold out or gone out of business). Quite a few games were never fixed, so the time was simply wasted. One such game I remember with particular dread was called "Grab des Pharaohs" (Tomb of the pharaoh) from the German magazine C64er (at least that's how I remember the name) - this game was in many, many, MANY parts, taking up tens of pages each issue, and the end result was supposed to be a game where you entered a pyramid on an exciting adventure...
In reality, the listings were full of typos, so each month came with a few corrections, but in the end, it still didn't work properly and was never fixed! Oh, the days!
...and you would find that you had more fun debugging the code than actually playing the game. It was a game within a game.
Man, I used to code games back then (assembler) and sound tracks :)
wow.. that brings back memories. The excitement, the utter excitement of buying the book from the Book Club in school.. waiting weeks or months to finally get the book.. the anticipation after seeing the pictures! And the inevitable, *inevitable* incredible let down after seeing the final results on the screen! But we were back in the pioneering days, this was all new, always different, always exciting to see what comes next... do you know what its like to see photo-realistic imagery flying around the screen now in a game?! I still cant believe it.. decades have passed but in a flash. Games these days, indeed what can be done on a computer now, is simply incredible to me.
yeah same here. Book club! :D
Book club here, too! Scholastic was the company involved, I think.
@@paul_boddie yes i think thats the one!
Great video! Thanks for the link to Usborne, can't wait to look through some of those to try on my C64 :)
When I was 12y old (1995) I bought a special edition of some gaming magazine that discussed programming games for x86 architecture (486DX2 instruction set) in TASM (Turbo ASM) and little did I realize back then this was NOT the easiest entry point into game programming (what a shocking revelation!). Funnily enough I'm back to square one as I again code in assembly (though "tad bit" more powerful MVS mainframe architecture). Those were days. Today my two kids learn visual coding by effortlessly moving blocks of code with layers upon layers of frameworks, and I'm just amazed how simple and accessible programming has become.
some of these games used to live on programmable calculators :D this brings back memories
Amazing video, it's rather nice to see there are people more like me interested in retro computers.
Artillery like games (shooting at each others with an mountain between you) are fun ...
Great Vid Kari!
I recently discovered Usborne books after watching a vid by Matt Godbolt describing the fundamentals of machine code.
It seems they nailed it way back then so still relevant today which is a big achievement.
I using exactly these books to program my spectrum 48k in the 80s . I found the keyboard a nightmare haha . Thank you for a trip down memory lane !
your setup looks amazing! And your concept and execution just phenomenal! I can't wait for more of your videos 🤩
I love these videos!!!! Talk about taking me back!!
I've still got my books and have them in my classroom. The kids are fascinated by them as it's almost alien to them.
Wow! *New Sub* I turned 59 this year and I've been in a retro mood as of late. I was looking into retro coding and so forth. This is right up my alley. The first computer I ever worked on was a TRS-80. My first computer I bought was a Vic-20 followed by a Commodore 64. I just bought a Commodore 64 mini this month. I am putting together my own "school" curriculum and these look so much fun. Thanks for the video!
Back in my day for the C64 in the back of the mag there used to be a tonne of hex values that one would type in with error checking. It was so exciting to type it up and play it! Thanks for the interesting video! Keep up the good work!
Same on the Spectrum.. machine code programs printed out as Hex values, and you would type the whole lot into a Basic program called a Hex loader, then save it to tape.. and hopefully it worked !
My mom, recognizing a bargain, used to help me do the same. She would narrate the hex while I typed. Only person who I know whose mom would read him hexadecimal. 😂
@@markasiala6355 Haha! That's awesome. I was only allowed 45 minutes a day with my computer, after which I had to unplug it from the TV and put it in my room. I would wait until they think I am sleeping and then I would type the hex codes blind into the editor, using the movement of the tape drive to confirm entries xD
hi i'm leo 41 and this takes me back to my old days when i opened up my zx manual or apple 2e :)
Great video. If it wasn't for the Usborne books and my local library, I wouldn't have the career in software development I have today. I used to love those books, we always knew the end result wouldn't be as exciting as the art made it out to be, but it got us interested enough to keep us focussed enough to enter the listings and then alter them and understand what was happening. I'd like to see more of these if you're up for making more videos like this. Thank you for the memories :)
I was born in 83 and my first computer was the James Bond version of spectrum zx2 so thins brought back memories . Can’t believe I’ve never found this channel before . Your videos are really brilliant
This channel is going to blow up really soon. Here before 10k subs.
My brother and I used to spend weeks typing in code from magazines. More often, the published codes had spelling mistakes. Only ONE spelling mistake meant the program won't run. Commodore 64, it was 1984-1988.
BASIC is what got me into programming and culminated in a -admittedly brief- career as a software engineer. It's a shame the language wasn't more standardised even though BASICode tried to remedy that somewhat successfully.
I have one of the Usborne books from back in the day, and I used other, similar books from the local public library to learn programming as a kid. They were already old, then (in the early 90's), but they were fun to work through. :-) Some of the computers they'd mention were unknown to me outside of these books, and only since the advent of UA-cam have I finally seen some of them in action, including the ZX Spectrum (and earlier Sinclair machines), which were sold under the Timex brand here in the US but with only limited sales success. Nobody I knew owned anything other than an Apple II series 8-bit computer or IBM PC clone at the time. Other computers were just things I had seen in stores or mentioned in passing in computer books, despite the success many of them apparently had had just a few years earlier, when I was too young to notice such things.
Your audience demographic is now 50+ computer enthusiasts! 🤣🤣🤣
I had several of these books. I actually typed in every program in one book and saved them on tape. I even created a very very basic menu to choose the games
Those braids are sick! :D
@@karilawler lol, you're welcome!
I remember as a teenager, when these kinds of computers were popular, they had some of them running at the stores to try them out with the BASIC interpreter open. I used to quickly write a little number guessing game like in this video into every such computer I encountered.
At home I had a Commodore 16 back then where I learned to program in BASIC.
I used to program out of these books on my infant school's BBC Micro in the '80s, I remember doing a horse betting game, and a top down racing game where you avoided the sides of a canyon and stars representing obstacles.
Was that last one Death Valley?
@@wisteelaThat name rings a bell, yeah.
Kari! You took me back to my youth. This is how I learned to code on my TI-99. I couldn't afford a floppy drive, so my mom rigged up a cassette player.
How did you get into retro tech Kari?
@@karilawler fabulous 🤩. Then enjoy the journey as much as I do..🙏✌️☮️🕊️
haha this takes me back, my first Computer as a 8 year old, the ZX81 (the prequal to the ZX Spectrum), upgraded from 1k memory with a 16k ram pack, try programming on that touch (not very) sensitive keyboard.
Can you fix me?
I have clear containers with blue handles like the ones in the background but mine are bigger and the corners have structural reinforcement so you can stack a lot of them. Perfect way to store stuff.
Thx. Got a real kick out of this. I too back in the day spent a lot of time entering code from mags into my machine and learning basic. Yes, please do another game.
This is GREAT and UA-cam knows what I love. I am so pleased to see someone of your age into this, I come from this era (loving the t-shirt too) and it brings back wonderful (and sometimes frustrated) memories of a wonderful pastime (plus you're a fellow Brit ha ha). Thank you I will be watching more of your vids, keep up the wonderful work.
Hi Kari, it was lovely to see the ZX Spectrum again, I spent ages 12-14 playing Skool Daze, Hungry Horace,Ghost Rider and so many fun games on it. We used to break into the programs and just change the credits and try pass them off as our own games to girls.🙊😂😂 But I went on to become a CNC programmer for Lathes and Milling Machines in Engineering and lived a very luxurious life for a lot of years. I can easily see how you find electronics and programming exciting.Thanks for sharing! ❤️+✌️
so there are only 2 vidoes up yet on this channel and youtube already know i would love this :D soooonice seeing those old corde book tutorials. back in the days when i was way too little to understand what they were about i felt like im gonna keep them store them for later when i become a space man working on a starship like in startrek and i would be the special know everything guy because i have saved those books :D like how to defend against aliens for example .. it after all said so right in those books .."defend yourself against alien attackers ... " and i felt like yeah some day im gonna be able to do that :D
What incredible content, whatever is going on with your mic also has this ASMR effect, the whole flipping through the book was amazing. All the best gadgets, I could watch this all day.
Yes “the never ending story” nice another memory lol
LOL I used to do this with my Atari 800xl, love those magazines. How fun,! Luv your channel.
The video was awesome already, but the choice of the outro tune was divine! Had an instant 80's flashback.
My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. But funny thing: I never really was into games. I was more into utilities and useful applications. Wrote a database program on a C64 once. I was so deep into computers that I didn't even get a girlfriend until I was 26. Here I am nowadays, regressing (computer-wise) and investing in old stuff, remembering what I made back then, and kinda shunning modern crap anymore. Seems like I'm having more fun with that older stuff, than anything they come out with nowadays. And I'm 54, btw...
i am contemplating gaming as viable option for pass time, it's a form of created fun
"These program books are over 40 years old". Me too Kari... Me too... 🤣🤣
My mom got me those books when i was a kid so nostalgic!
Love the studio, the camera angle! Your are a natural. More video !
I have this amazing memory when I was 5 years old of my Nan looking after me one day, my Dad had got a commordore 64 sometime before this, my Nan brought round a programming magazine she had got from a bootfair just like the ones in this video. We had an amazing day programming in all sorts of games and saving them to the cassette. After watching this video it hit me right in the heart when I was about to ring her and see if she remembers which magazine it was but sadly she passed two years ago. Miss her everyday x
Subscribed! Growing up in the 80's was a blast
Hi Kari! I am 65 years old and I used to fill my evenings (and nights) typing in these codes from the magazines I bought. Great fun seeing someone your age doing this in 2024! Keep up the good work! Great fun!
Nice! I submitted a number of programs like that back in the 80's and had many published. It was great fun at the time. Glad you showcased these!
Thank you, UA-cam for such a great recommendation! This video was awesome! Thanks for making and sharing it. :)
AHHH! So many memories - having a ZX Spectrum in the 1980s, spending a lot of time programming in basic (although never got really advanced), typing in programs from books and magazines and they finding they don't work...
It was such a great time and this video does make me feel very nostalgic.
After a while third-party producers brought out "proper" keyboards for the Spectrum, so although you still pressed one key to get the command, the keys themselves were plastic, the case was bigger and it was more like a full size keyboard. The keyboard was attached to the main chipboard by a couple of flat ribbon-style cables, so it was easy to swap for a different one. It made for much easier programming.
When Speccy magazines went from publishing code that had to be copied out for hours to including tapes with a load of old games on them was bigger for me than the shift from hard drvies to SSDs. Great video!
Love this enthusiasm. With the same enthusiasm I got started on a TI 99/4A in 1983. The only difference being that I actually wrote my own games, all in BASIC. For us, the first generation of computer kids, the home computer was the gate to a world of wonders and imagination. With all that came later, this is hard to imagine nowadays.
This brought back fond memories - great video.
Back in the 80s I regularly bought the magazines to put the games listings in, spending hours and hours doing it. I’ve still got some of the old magazines, Your Computer and Computer and Video Games. The listings with embedded machine code were especially fun to do, endless lines of hex numbers put in manually - get one number wrong and it’s all over. What fun! There is a short video of a game called Vic Logger for the Vic-20 on UA-cam. I remember everybody in the house playing it. Now it looks so basic but at the time it was completely riveting. I even got a couple of games published in magazines myself, basically knock offs of the old game and watch games. Keep up the good work!
A fantastic video Kari, I am in my early 50s now and grew up with the ZX Spectrum as it was my first home computer, I still own the Usborne book collection and enjoyed programming from them when I was a kid. It is great to see young people such as yourself taking an interest in these historic computers and programming in BASIC. The other book Usborne Computer Battlegames was very good also. It would be interesting to you program the games in each book as those ones contain animated graphics to create simple games.
Great content.
I learned coding on the speccy! Its not long before you can just type away even with the key combinations. When my kids were growing up, we did quite a lot of coding starting with the speccy and those very same books. Many Schools in the 1980s used the spectrum as a class computer and did projects all around the curriculum using them. It was a real blast from the past watching you code and run one.
I grew up loaning these books from the library and learning to program at home, and many *many* years later, I'm still writing code professionally as a software developer. I love how you found same joy as I did in the goofy illustrations and story they tried to weave around these simple programs. Honestly it brings a huge smile to my face seeing a new generation discover these books. Thank you!
I remember in 1983 learning simple coding on a Mac in a highschool class. We were given instructions on how to make colored lines or moving dots, and after understanding what the code could do I mapped out a smiling face with moving eyes and mouth. That was my first introduction to coding. When you understand the power of coding you can do amazing things.
Thank you. This brought back memories. I use to play games on a Radio Shack TR80 back in high school. Thanks for the links to the books. Looking forward to reading through them.
Wow! What a nostalgia hit! My dad brought back a 128K ZX Spectrum from the UK when I was 5 or 6 and I DEFINITELY remember that book. My attempts to program a game failed miserably, but that console sparked a lifetime love of computers. Thank you!
I've not seen this mentioned in the comments, so I'll add this: by using one key to input a complete command, the Spectrum BASIC interpreter saved memory space that other versions of BASIC (usually made by Microsoft) needed to convert a fully typed command into the single byte token stored in RAM by the interpreter. It eliminated the need for a tokenizer and the data table holding the names of the commands.
Please continue your wonderful videos!
What a nice video, thank you! I remember typing in programs from computer books back then but I don't think I ever saw any of these Usborne books until I heard about them in recent years. They're quite nice with all the artwork, etc.
First time seeing your videos. You are an excellent presenter. Very natural and enjoyable to watch. I wish I would have known these type in games existed back in the day:)
I remember being able to "check out" a Timex Sinclair 1000 from our library as a kid. With its awful membrane keyboard it would take ages to enter a program. I'm enjoying watching you port BASIC games into python. I wonder if you might explore the reverse -- porting more modern (simple) games to BASIC!
very nerdy and geeky awesome content, loved it!