I was digging through a box this week looking for a video cable and came across the Tape Recorder adapter cable for the TI99/4A. I still remember how excited I was the day I got that cable. To actually be able to save my work after spending hours typing in game code from Byte magazine! (Naturally the expansion cabinet and hard drive were way too expensive).
Brings me back to my early days of cutting my teeth on the Extended Basic cartridge and Pirate Adventure. Say Yoho!
I would like to look back fondly on the time I wrote my own games, or keyed in those from magazines (a shout out to BYTE and COMPUTE! mags). But my reptile brain stem is dredging up a post-traumatic stress reaction remembering endless hours banging in page after page of DATA, PEEK and POKE statements on my Atari 400. My fingers ache now thinking of that hateful membrane keyboard.
My roots are founded in a device from Texas Instruments as well, the TI-82 graphing calculator. Man, I got so bored in high school that I created a whole text-based RPG game on that thing. There was so much code that the thing ran out of memory! I think it only had like 32k or something like that.
I remember trying to optimize it too, going through and shortening variable names and such. Ah, such glory… I had no idea what I was doing. But I was fascinated.
OK kids – my first PC was a TI 99/4 (NOT A) – chicklet keyboard and all! Fought endlessly with a cassette recorder to save BASIC programs – system crashed regularly – problem “solved” when I plunked down $1K of hard-earned, part-time job cash for 360K floppy.
Anyone besides me remember TI Advanced BASIC? (Good times!)
Re: For a programmer, analyzing games is almost as fun as playing them.
When I was a senior at Purdue, I interviewed on campus with some gaming company (I think it was EA). They kept on trying to get me to tell them about the games I played and I kept on trying to tell them about the game I had designed and written. It was just a little RPG, but I still found that more enjoyable than playing the RPG’s of the day and still do today.
Minesweeper the movie, hosted at College Humor dot Com
NOT. SAFE. FOR. WORK.
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1770138
The video itself is safe, but college humor dot com is not.
Anyhow, it’s nice to see retro revisited now and again 
I think the first game I played as a kid was a stock trader game. Ugh. And now I’m enjoying playing with stocks to adjust people’s long and short term incomes? Damn you video games! shakes an angry fist
I had a “Trash 80” and a CPM machine. The latter was cool because I could buy PROM chips with games on them. What’s funny is that I can’t actually remember any of the games, but I can clearly remember discovering that the Basic chip would let me record things (on the built-in microcassette drive) that I could play back later. One of my first attempts was a reflexive listening program that would untimately degenerate into insults and profanity. Great fun, but if anyone had told me that I was “programming” I would have laughed out loud. All that I was doing, after all, was typing in things that the computer could play back at the user’s prompting…
You guys are lucky that you had parents who encouraged you to program. My parents wanted nothing to do with computers until just a few years ago.
"computer games in the library after school"
Very excited to play asteroids or something, I went and saw
hunt the wumpus.
What a let-down! text games? Boring.
I must have complained out loud, cause the librarian knew just what to say…
“You can do better than that… try writing your own games”.
And a career was born while I was in 7th grade.
The computer industry grew up with us. We learned how to program by
typing in those simple games from magazines and books.
Nope. The computer industry grew up before you. Here’s an example:
In 1971 in high school, I wrote a Star Trek game in APL.
See? He didn’t even type in a simple game from a magazine or book, he programmed it himself. The computer industry was nearly already grown up by that time. The minesweeper game was already known at that time too.
Hahaha
I too wrote code pulled from Byte magazine to write games like Snake and Space Invaders. My first personal comp was an Apple IIC. I hadn’t figured out how to save it, so My machine was up for days so I didn’t have to write it again. Early 80s… hmmmm… Thanks for reminding me how old I am
Yeah, for me it was reprogramming “Combat” (tank version) on an old Tandy 1000 in Basic. My tanks left treadmarks and craters. I even built a map editor!
Ran great until I replaced the Tandy with a 386, then the tanks moved too quickly…
Ahh those were the days…
For folks who want a bit of a retro fling over the weekend, look up “BattleTank 2000”.NET on MSDN… Use that IDE for something frivilous for a change.
Wow, this brings back memories. I got hooked when I built a Heathkit H89 in 1980. It took every penny from a summer job plus some help from my parents, but it was well worth it. I had to wait a month before I could afford a copy of HDOS so I had to write programs in machine code and enter them byte-by-byte just to see some silly little animations.
A couple of years later, I bought a copy of the source code to the OS. It was five large bound volumes of 8080 assembly language, which included the OS, assembler, basic interpreter and various tools. I read those listings over and over until I understood how the whole thing worked.
In my case it was text only games programming.
I guess I got in late in the game when I started on an AppleIIc, C64, and TRS80 MkII. I was glued to them for hours coding in stuff from magazines then picking 'em apart to roll my own stuff. Sadly, I never advanced to the point of emulating the quality of Hard Hat Mac, Bushido, or Art of War but the ability to crank out simple code has served me well.
I had a Timex Sinclair with expanded 4k pack. I would type in the hex codes for the games we would play only to have someone bump the memory pack and I would loose it all! After working all summer I finally could afford a real computer… the commodore 64. I would spend weeks recreating games like Donkey Kong. I would make gaming adjustments and pass the updated versions along to my friends. 25(ish) years later I am attempting to go back to college to pursue my dream of being a programmer WITH a paycheck. LOL
Like a lot of folks here I started out with a ZX81 (and saved up my pocket money for a Memotech 16k ram pack!), and then the Spectrum. Learned a lot of Basic then Z80 ASM, but then went cold turkey on coding because it was taking up too much time. Only recently started to program as a hobby again, and boy, have things moved on!
My first computer too was a ZX81 (around 1983), but a friend of mine had a TI-99/4a. He also had a text adventure about pirates, which we finally solved after many hours of playing. This game became the inspiration for writing several text adventures on my ZX-81 and later on the BBC B computer. When I bought an Atari ST in 1986, I stopped writing games. When I bought a PC in 1992, I stopped playing them.
This comment thread has been wonderfully nostalgic.
I started out with a Timex Sinclair 1000 and an old Eaton Viking cassette recorder, typing, saving, (attempting to) load. Unfortunately the 16k RAM expansion was a luxury that could not be had. Next was the TRS-80 MC-10, a far more powerful computer (4k! sound! color!) but without saving capabilities (didn’t have the correct cable).
Throughout public school, the only computers we had to learn on were Apple ][s. (Bear in mind that I graduated in 1992. I owned a C-64, and had never actually used a '486 at that point.)
I wrote an Integer BASIC game somewhat like Monopoly as an honours project, and used dial-up - to connect to CompuServe - to research some geography questions that made up the core of the game. I managed to finish the project despite playing at least two hours of Taipan per day. I also made my own variant of Taipan for the C64, and called it Cartel. (Yes, very much like Dope Wars.)
I had an Amiga 500 during college, when everyone else had Pentium-based PCs. I did the 1 MB Chip RAM upgrade (motherboard mod + Fatter Agnus swap) and added an external 40 MB hard drive! (Yes, MB)
My first PC was a P-133 with 8 MB RAM and a 4.3 GB hard drive. Cost: $2000. Operating system? DOS. Things have blossomed since then.
P-133 - P-200 (w/MMX) - K6-2-300 - K6-2-450 - Athlon 700 - Athlon XP 1600+ - Athlon 64 3000+ (Venice) - Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Toledo)
I’m still writing software for PC and for embedded controllers. I still love it.
Jeff – thanks for the great post.
I wrote a Pac-Man-esque game in QBASIC about 20 years ago. It was like discovering a new planet. Though I don’t code for a living, I’ve been writing programs since then just because I enjoy it so much.
I agree that one of the best ways to learn programming is to write a game.