Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler I'm so Old, I remember when...

I've been outgeeked.

OK, the rest of you can watch a movie for a few minutes... Bren and I are having a propeller-head moment discussing the PEEKing and POKEing values at 3:00am, as a young Kruncher in training, just to see what happens, and writing routines to create Vic music. This was followed some months later by learning to code sprites on a C64.

10 PRINT CHR$(147);
20 POKE 36878,15:POKE 36879,8
30 VO=INT(RND(0)*3)+1:VA=INT(RND(0)*255)+1
40 POKE 36873+VO,VA:POKE 36879,VA
50 GOTO 30

I still remember CBM BASIC V2 like it was yesterday. 6502 assembler comes a lot slower.

(for everyone else, that plays random tones with each of the 3 "voices" and flashes the screen and border colour in tandem)

Bren R.

I remember walking to kindergarten on my own and being sent home early because JFK had been assassinated.

I remember typing all my college papers on a Smith Corona typewriter because they were no computers yet, graduating from college just prior to the introduction of the PC.

I remember applying to graduate school over 10 years later and my mom (who worked at that time for a nonprofit for disabled children) stating, "What a shame, no one will take these applications seriously because they're printed on a typewriter and not a computer."

Now that`s impressive! Ah, the magic 368 series. Clearly you spent as much time as I did with all that. I remember plotting equations, likely with the Super Expander as well and trying to code a Spirograph-type app.

My 8086 assembler is, thankfully, rusty now, a blur of MOVs, DECs and INCs.

Learned much from the early magazine articles of Neil Rubenking, Alfred Poor et al.

EDIT: I remember now! COMPUTE magazine. The name escaped me earlier.

Jump into the DeLorean, and set it for 1979. Compute magazine archives.

COMPUTE! and COMPUTE!'s Gazette... all the Jim Butterfield books, and the other, lamer magazines (Family Computing - enter these 9 columns of program listing and get a program to quiz you on algebra!)... I used to get BASIC programming books from the school booksales. I remember trying to write a Scott Adams type adventure and trying to figure out how to get the items you pick up OUT of the room you're in and into your inventory. Then I read about using (0) of the room arrays as an unexploreable room that would be the player's inventory. Why didn't I think of that?

I wish I could go back to those times as an adult now, knowing more about trig, physics, art, storytelling and all that stuff.

Bren R.

The coincidences never seem to end tonight. Within the last month I downloaded and installed Zork 1... on my Vista machine.

I couldn`t believe it when I found all those Zork games available to download.

The Scott Adams ones are all available on his site, there's a little parser EXE and then a bunch of individual files for each of the adventures.

Bren R.

This has been good fun Bren. Thanks for the memories. Off to play some "Reelin in the Years" now. Sadly, on CD, not vinyl or 8 track.