Jul -- Computers and Technology: Does anyone else remember type-in programs?

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Posted on 10-13-10 12:36:09 PM

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My dad has literally stacks of these for his Commodore 64. I may actually do a few at some point. They sound good.

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Posted on 10-13-10 01:50:19 PM

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I'm not old enough to have encountered those... and I don't know anyone who really got in to that stuff.

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Posted on 10-15-10 08:16:07 AM

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Yeah, I've got the stacks of magazines for the C64, with all those programs you have to type in. Including the ones that gave you a machine-language checksum program to try to help you make sure you're typing them in, correctly.

Never really did get around to typing in that one miles-long program that was supposedly a fully-featured paint program...

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Posted on 10-15-10 06:53:45 PM

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I postdate those; I come from the era of attached 5 inch and then 2.5 inch floppy disks instead.

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Posted on 10-16-10 08:33:16 AM

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Nobody's ever done a foxgirl, to my knowledge. And Disgaea's awesome, so... yeah.

I remember type-in QBasic programs.

I still need to do some of those out of that book I have. Maybe I could actually program something worth using/porting, or something.

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Posted on 10-16-10 02:59:04 PM

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No, but my dad made a very basic writing program for me when I was very young from BASIC, based on how I typed in the function keys and ended up getting these words seemingly from random. 

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Posted on 10-16-10 04:18:48 PM (last edited by Terra at 10-16-10 01:22 PM)

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My dad tried to learn BASIC programming too, but he gave up on it. Then, I used his old book to learn it.

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Posted on 10-16-10 09:09:11 PM

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10-16-10 04:09:11 PM
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I wonder how hard it'd be to OCR the programs and feed them to an emulator?

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Posted on 10-17-10 03:55:57 AM

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Originally posted by TerraOK, basically, in the Stone Age of computers (roughly the 1980s)

Wouldn't that be the 1940's? 

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Posted on 10-17-10 08:24:05 PM

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Our algebra textbook had several BASIC type-in programs.

It was pretty ancient, it also had many other outdated exercises such as population counts in East Germany.

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Posted on 10-17-10 08:31:30 PM

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I had some math books in elementary school with BASIC programs in them. They had a lot of mistakes, though

It was a generic BASIC dialect that would probably work with Apple, Commodore, Atari, etc. computers.

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Posted on 10-18-10 01:57:32 AM

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I think I've only seen type-in programs maybe once or twice... I vaguely remember seeing a few (including a NIM program and Count to a Million) in some old book... =)

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Posted on 10-19-10 04:38:06 AM

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	I remember borrowing a BASIC book from the library years ago, which had a complete type-in RPG-style "game" in the back. It took (what seemed like) hours to type it all into QBASIC, and when I finally clicked Run... syntax error I was...really, really unhappy. I think I uttered more than a few choice words regarding the author's intelligence (since there were a couple of pretty obvious typos in the code), and since I didn't have a terribly good grasp of BASIC programming, I couldn't fix it. What a waste of a day that was. ____________________

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Posted on 10-20-10 08:43:05 AM

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Originally posted by Rena
I wonder how hard it'd be to OCR the programs and feed them to an emulator?

I wonder if anyone has archives on them, anywhere on the net, to feed to an emulator, or something. A lot of interesting programs from the time are just disappearing/being forgotten... which reminds me, I really should see if those old magazines are still in good condition.

I'd have to wonder about some of the programs they used in Compute! Magazine, IIRC - the 'machine language' ones, that (also IIRC) used a really thin and tiny font, and had a checksum off to the right. Would probably make OCRing fun, especially trying to get something to parse it, afterward.

Oh, yeah - the math textbooks with the really, really, really simple BASIC programs. Although at that time, the school couldn't be bothered to actually let us USE computers on campus...

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Posted on 10-20-10 09:41:26 AM

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I wrote a type-in program last week

And yeah, I do remember finding those adventure/RPG game books at the library with cheesy BASIC programs in them. Same with elementary school math textbooks that had simple BASIC and LOGO code in them.

Of course I didn't actually have an interpreter for either of those so it was all kind of a "what if" thing for me until I finally started playing with QuickBasic in the early 2000s, and by then I had better things to mess around with than elementary school math.

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Posted on 10-20-10 01:55:21 PM

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I remember reading those when I was very young and having no idea what to do with them. I also (very likely) overestimated the graphical qualities of said games based on the cover art of the books.

None of them are hanging around in torrent form?

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Posted on 10-26-10 09:47:17 AM

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Originally posted by THE GREAT SALAMI CAPER
And yeah, I do remember finding those adventure/RPG game books at the library with cheesy BASIC programs in them.

Oh, right. Forgot about those, too. I actually have one, somewhere. Don't remember why, though.

I think it was basically a generic "help us save the world" plot... but all of them were probably like that, right?

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