Starting again

[ilaskey]

I was trying to explain to my 13yo son about how computers used to come ready to program etc as he's started making noises about doing game design. I fired up Altirra and for the first time in 30 years wrote a few lines of Atari Basic. Amazed I even remembered this much. He was quite taken in by it and spent half an hour happily playing about with it, trying different numbers etc. Anyway, here it is, nothing special but I was chuffed after all these years. I used to write stuff in a mix of of this and 6502, usually and later a bit of Action and Basic XE. Wish I'd kept all my old programs but it all went years ago when I upgraded to the ST.
10 GRAPHICS 7
20 FOR X=1 TO 100
30 COLOR X
40 PLOT X,0
50 DRAWTO 1,70
60 NEXT X
70 FOR X=1 TO 100
80 SETCOLOR 1,X,X
85 SETCOLOR 3,X+5,X+5
86 SOUND 0,X,Y,200
90 NEXT X
100 SOUND 0,0,0,0

[Mclaneinc]

Well done Ian, keep the flag flying

[phoenixdownita]

I was trying to explain to my 13yo son about how computers used to come ready to program etc as he's started making noises about doing game design. I fired up Altirra and for the first time in 30 years wrote a few lines of Atari Basic. Amazed I even remembered this much. He was quite taken in by it and spent half an hour happily playing about with it, trying different numbers etc. Anyway, here it is, nothing special but I was chuffed after all these years. I used to write stuff in a mix of of this and 6502, usually and later a bit of Action and Basic XE. Wish I'd kept all my old programs but it all went years ago when I upgraded to the ST.

10 GRAPHICS 7

20 FOR X=1 TO 100

30 COLOR X

40 PLOT X,0

50 DRAWTO 1,70

60 NEXT X

70 FOR X=1 TO 100

80 SETCOLOR 1,X,X

85 SETCOLOR 3,X+5,X+5

86 SOUND 0,X,Y,200

90 NEXT X

100 SOUND 0,0,0,0

Line 86, what happened to Y? Where did it come from?

Why did you kill the Y? Oh why, oh Y?

 

It needs to be said than back in those days more than learning to program we learnt how to hack our way around, structure, order and rigor were rarely a pattern

If it worked nobody could dare to critique. Basic did not help for sure in forming good programming habit.

Edited June 28, 2015 by phoenixdownita

[gilsaluki]

Your Atari 8-bit waits for you to program.

[ilaskey]

Line 86, what happened to Y? Where did it come from?

Why did you kill the Y? Oh why, oh Y?

 

It needs to be said than back in those days more than learning to program we learnt how to hack our way around, structure, order and rigor were rarely a pattern

If it worked nobody could dare to critique. Basic did not help for sure in forming good programming habit.

Ah, thought I'd restored his experiments, missed that, still, made a nice enough noise :-)

 

Programming wise, I think I learned more about conciseness and optimization of resource. Later on when writing C on Unix/mainframes, it became all too easy to get a bit happy mallocing whatever you needed and certainly, younger colleagues wonder why I bother to only take what is needed, be it disk or RAM. Modern compilers do make it easier to write clearer code that is easy for humans to parse, knowing the compiler will do a lot of the tweaking for me. Nothing worse than going back to old code and wondering what on Earth was going on!

[snicklin]

I'm disgusted that you didn't show off the colour high definition graphics in gr.15!

[morelenmir]

It was a real lurch for me from using an 800XL at home to an Acorn A3000 at a school... Just the metaphor of the GUI was so totally alien. Mind you, I picked it up fast - half an hour or so. But it took me years and years to really appreciate what the situation was with an A8 and its built-in basic and how a modern - then! - PC works.

 

Its an odd thought. With an A8 you are essentially presented with a similar situation to if every time Windows starts it launches straight in to a session of "Visual BASIC", where the only way to manipulate files is to directly enter immediate-mode code to read and write... And then to do anything more complex you have to open a console window - which takes up the whole flow of execution until you exit it... Weird!!! Genuinely a different world.

 

The ultimate future-shock for me as a fourteen-year old kiddie would have been the concept of running Altirra in its window while having "FarCry4" - or any modern game - open in another window on the the desktop... I think I might have had a paranoid embolism on the spot! They say you learn and grasp concepts easier as a child but that is absolutely not the case with me. I learn so much faster now than I ever did back then.

 

The other weekend I set up a DOS 6.22 machine... There isn't much that starts you feeling like DOS is a swish upgrade, but going from an A8 really showed me how fast things were chaning back in the mid-eighties and what it must have been like! 640K RAM... Mind boggling!

[fujidude]

An unmatured brain does have the ability to absorb new concepts better (so the scientists say), but previous experience also makes learning something new (but building on the old) easier. For some examples, they say it is far easier for children to learn additional languages (spoken/written, not computer languages) than for adults. On the other hand, I do know that learning a computer programming language is easier if you already have learned other computer programming languages. That goes for people of any age. As it happens, older people typically have gained more previous experience than younger people.

Edited June 29, 2015 by fujidude